


In the Velvet Darkness

by devje



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-20
Updated: 2014-08-20
Packaged: 2018-01-25 21:33:03
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 48,018
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1663199
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/devje/pseuds/devje
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Emma Swan wakes up alone. Completely alone.</p><p>[Roughly 2-3 years post-S3. Swearing from the start, gets NSFW from Chapter 5]</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Friday Morning

Stretching was the best thing ever, Emma Swan decided, as she balled her fists and rotated her shoulders, working the sleep from her tired muscles. She pushed her feet onto the mattress and arched her back off the bed, then flopped back down with a happy moan. She was considering drifting back to sleep when her stomach alerted her that it was hungry. The loud bubbling noise cut through the silence of the room and made her giggle. She pushed herself up and swung around, perching on the edge of the bed, listening out for her son, Henry, going through his morning routine, but she heard nothing. The house was dark and silent. 

As she blinked herself into full wakefulness, she realised that there was no light at all in the room. Pushing the home button on her cellphone, she saw that it was much earlier than she’d thought, only 4.23am. Yawning, she looked around for something warm to throw over her thin t-shirt. Amongst the piles of clothes on the floor, she spotted a frayed college sweatshirt, a reminder of the person she used to be before Henry and Storybrooke and family. She’d liberated it from a one-night stand as she snuck out of a college dorm room in the middle of the night. She’d taken a couple of twenties from the girl’s purse for a cab, too. While she didn’t remember many names from her former life, she remembered places, and that had been Alabama, so nine years ago now. Time flies, she thought.

Leaving the bedroom, making sure to avoid the creaky floorboard by the door, she headed towards the kitchen, thinking about what she could eat which would be quick and easy. As she pulled open the refrigerator door, the lack of any light made her realise why it was so dark and quiet. Power cut. 

She placed her palm against the milk. It was still ice cold. She put it on the counter, fetched a bowl and spoon, and looked at the array of cereal in the cupboard. When she lived alone, every box would have featured a cartoon character and contained enough sugar to rot her teeth. Now that she was a semi-responsible parent with a teenage son, she had only the good kind, the ones with fibre and wheat and fruit. She picked one at random, filled her bowl, poured her milk, and headed over to the sofa. 

Sitting cross-legged, she reflexively picked up the TV remote before her sleepy brain reminded her that power cuts meant no electricity, not even for TV. She’d been in foster homes where the heat and power had been cut off for non-payment, and as an adult she’d illegally squatted in apartments with no utilities turned on, but she wasn’t sure of the last time she’d been caught up in an actual power cut. Boston, probably. And that made her smile, because it reminded her how good her life had become because she didn’t ever worry about making rent or paying the bills these days. She had a home of her own, a son, parents, friends, an on-off boyfriend who was a pirate in his spare time.

Killian. She would have to do something about him eventually. They’d been limping along for too long now, mostly because she felt like being with him was what she should do, but it was becoming increasingly awkward that he felt a lot more for her than she felt for him. When they started out, she had thought that she might fall in love with him in time, but that never happened. They were great friends and had been good fuck-buddies, at least in the beginning, and she did love him in her own way, but it was never going to be more than that. True Love needed two people, not one who was really, really persistent and sure of it. They were in an off period just now, the result of a huge fight over Henry. Hook had let him get drunk on rum, and Emma had reminded him that Henry was only fifteen and that Hook was not the boy’s step-father, and in fact had no real part in his life. That led to yet another fight about how Emma let Regina tell her what to do instead of Emma making her own decisions about Henry. Emma had ordered him out of the house, telling him not to return until he was ready to take back the accusation and apologise. That had been weeks ago, and she didn’t really miss Hook except as someone to have a beer with after work on the weeks when Henry was staying at Regina’s.

Regina Mills, Henry’s other mother. Another subject Emma didn’t want to think about at fuck-off o’clock.

Yawning again, she put her bowl down on the coffee table and let her head fall back against the couch. Now that her stomach was sated, she could afford a short nap before getting her son to school and heading into work and everyday life.

+

When she jerked awake again, it wasn’t daylight yet and the house was still silent. The digital display on the microwave was blank, so the power was still out. Spotting her cellphone lying on the coffee table, she checked its screen. 6.47am. Henry should at least be awake, but he used a clock-radio to get up in the morning, and the power cut would’ve silenced it. 

Padding along the hallway of their single-storey home in her bare feet, she stopped outside his bedroom door. 

“Henry, you awake?” No answer. She tapped lightly on the door. “Hen? There’s been a power cut, but you need to get up for school now, kid.” Still nothing. She pushed the door open and her heart rate kicked into high gear as she found his bedroom empty. The bed was perfectly made and there was no Henry to be seen. “Henry!”

Bathroom. He was probably just down the hall in the bathroom and hadn’t heard her over the noise of the shower. But the house was silent. No shower. She ran down the hall and pulled the door open, just to be certain. Other than the slow drip from the leaking shower head she had never got around to fixing, there was nothing. She peered into the sink. Completely dry.

“Henry!” She was starting to panic now. “Henry! Where the hell are you?” She went through the remaining rooms of the house, calling his name, even though her instincts told her he was gone.

Jesus, what if he’d run away? She was pretty sure that he’d been seeing someone—her money was on Grace, Jefferson’s daughter, but she wasn’t certain—so that was a possibility. She remembered what it was to be fifteen and driven purely by hormones. But, no, she reassured herself, her son would not stay out all night with a girl. Henry was raised better than that. Mostly by Regina, she had to admit. Their son was a good boy. Her heart sank. A good boy who had run away to Boston to find her when he was only ten.

Crap.

Think. Think. She’d been a bounty hunter. She could do this. She could track people better than anyone else in town. She could assess a person from a quick look at their possessions. Okay, so that was a plan. Check out his stuff, see what it told her.

She went back to his bedroom and did a quick survey. Backpack open on the floor, so he hadn’t left early for school which, given how hard he studied, hadn’t been entirely out of the question. Yesterday’s clothes thrown on the chair in the corner, so he’d got dressed again at some point, something clean. Sneaking out to meet a girlfriend was looking like a good bet. He was fifteen. Fifteen-year-old boys snuck out all the time to meet pretty girls and, when they came home, their mothers grounded them until they were at least fifty-three. Wait, cellphone on the nightstand. Okay, panicking a little more now, because no teenager went as far as the bathroom without their phone. Maybe he had a second phone, a burner for private texts he didn’t want anyone else to see. No, no. He wasn’t a felon. He didn’t think like a mark. He didn’t think like her, either.

Who did he think like? His mother. He thought like Regina. Nurture over nature. Her kid, but Regina’s son. Regina. She would have to tell Regina that Henry had run away, and she had no idea why because, last night, she had ‘helped’ him with homework, mostly by annoying him with questions about what he was doing, and then they’d watched one of the old X-Men movies and they’d been laughing and joking and he had been fine. He was fine. He didn’t drink—Hook incident aside—and he didn’t take drugs and he never got into trouble because he was their good, good boy.

The car. He could drive. She’d been teaching him to drive stick in the Bug ever since his birthday. She was going to give it to him when he turned sixteen, even though Regina thought they should buy him a compact automatic which would be safe and practical and boring. Emma raced through the house and yanked the front door open. The Bug and her police cruiser were in the driveway. And—shit, shit, shit—Henry’s bike, the thirty-speed, second-hand racer he’d saved up for from doing yard work (mostly for Regina) and loved more than any other possession, was still there.

Fuck this, she was calling Regina, who would definitely be up already because she always got up at six, she claimed, and Emma had always suspected that it was a lie because she’d seen Regina at the crack of dawn before, and no-one looked as good as that without serious time spent on clothes and make-up. Five-thirty, minimum, Emma thought. In any case, Regina would never mind being disturbed for anything to do with her boy, her little prince.

Maybe something had happened and Henry had run home to his mother. Emma wouldn’t judge if that were the case. Some things, he discussed with her, but other things could only be fixed by Regina because Emma was still more the best-friend-Mom than the Mom-Mom. That was okay, because they worked together. They were a team. Co-parents. Best friends, even. Their friendship was something Emma would never have seen coming in a million years when she first came to town, but shit happened. Shit like curses and Neverland and stealing Regina’s happy ending and being forgiven and there was no way in hell Regina would forgive her for this. 

As her thumb hovered over Regina’s number on her phone, her stomach really lurched as she realised that the street, like her home, was completely dark and silent. And that wasn’t possible. Despite the townsfolk having once been fairytale characters and inhabitants of an Enchanted Forest, Storybrooke was a fairly regular small town. At a quarter to seven on a weekday morning, people should be on its streets, heading to work and school, walking their dogs, going about their regular, non-fairytale day. But no-one was in sight.

And the silence was too silent.

“Henry! Henry Mills, you come out here this instant!” she called out into the nothingness. “Henry!” 

Phone still in hand, she marched out of the house, the dewy grass of her front yard cold and wet against her bare feet. Not only were there no people, there was a total absence of noise. No dog barked. No car passed. No bird chirped or insect buzzed. Storybrooke was completely silent in the gloom of the pre-dawn winter morning. For a second, she wondered whether she’d gone deaf, but that was a stupid thought because she’d heard herself call Henry’s name, heard her feet on wooden floorboards inside the house, heard the front door open. Reaching out, she slapped her hand against a nearby lamp post and felt both relief and dread as the sound of skin on metal reached her eardrums.

Something was very, very wrong.

“Henry!”

She sprinted to her neighbours’ door and banged loudly on it. Peter and Judy, an elderly couple who bickered all the time but loved each other desperately, were early risers. They wouldn’t mind the intrusion so that Emma could check that she hadn’t gone completely and utterly insane.

The door swung open as Emma pounded on it, a scene straight out of some crappy 1980s direct-to-video horror movie, and the same eerie silence greeted her. She didn’t have to go inside the house to know that they were not there. The cold sweat spreading across her body told her all she needed to know. But she went inside anyway. It was neat and tidy, as if its owners had simply cleared everything away and, instead of heading up to bed, just walked away, vanishing in the night.

“Henry! Come on, kid.”

She ran to the next house, and the next, and the next, and each of them was as empty as the one before. They were like show houses in the creepiest subdivision ever, offering the façade of a home with none of the warmth which came from real families living there.

“Henry!”

Oh God, this couldn’t be good, and her mind raced with serial killers and kidnappers and, worse, magic things that she didn’t understand. She wondered why she didn’t ever listen to Regina when she was trying to tell her magic stuff. Why was that a lesson that she never seemed to learn?

Think. Think. Deep, calming breaths.

She needed to get back to her house for her gun and her badge because she was the Sheriff and there was some serious shit going down. But, Henry. Where the fuck was Henry? She couldn’t worry about everyone else when she didn’t know what had happened to Henry. Fuck the gun and the badge. She ran to the end of the street. 

“Henry!” 

The intersection was as deserted as everywhere else. No matter what direction she looked in, there was nothing and no-one. 

“Henry!” She was getting close to tears. “Come on, Henry! Don’t do this!” She leaned her head back and howled his name as loud as she could. “Henry!”

She was still carrying her phone, she realised. Maybe someone else was out there. But even as she speed-dialled Regina’s number, she knew that it wouldn’t be answered. She kept calling out Henry’s name as she tried other numbers—her parents, Hook, Ruby, the Sheriff’s station, Archie, Kathryn, every landline and cellphone in her contacts—but no-one answered.

She sank to her knees on the cold asphalt and let her head fall forward. 

Maybe it was a dream. Yeah, that was it. She was having a nightmare, and Regina had been right about what would happen if they ate junk food at bedtime, and Emma would never do it again if only she could wake up and go through to her son’s room and find him lying there, late for school and snoring like nothing was wrong. Any second now, she’d wake up and they’d have toast for breakfast and she’d walk him the whole way to school, and she wouldn’t even care that having your Mom drop you off when you’re fifteen is the least cool thing in the world.

And then she heard it. Of course she heard it, because there was literally nothing else to hear in the oppressive silence except from her own ragged breathing. 

It was rubber on road, the squeal of tyres moving at speed. It was coming towards her, so she turned her head in the direction of the sound and waited. And she actually did cry, fearful, laughing tears, as she saw Regina’s black Mercedes pull up in front of her.

Regina looked as bad as Emma felt, unkempt and wild-eyed as she yanked the car door open and dropped to her knees in front of Emma.

“Where is he?”

Emma shook her head.

“Goddammit, Emma, where is my son?”

“I don’t fucking know!” She squeezed her eyes against the tears and the anger and the frustration and tilted her head towards the sky. “I woke up and he wasn’t in his room and his bike’s still there and there’s no-one here at all except you and me and I don’t fucking know.” And she looked at Regina, who was rage and fear and desperation in a pair of incongruous silk pyjamas and a cashmere winter coat, and Emma shook her head, her shoulders heaving as she cried without tears. “I just don’t fucking know.”

Regina grabbed her by the upper arms, shook her until Emma looked at her. Emma braced herself for the onslaught of accusations, but Regina just nodded.

“Okay.”

Okay? Was she insane? How the fuck was any of this okay, that they were on their knees in the street in a deserted town with no son, no Henry? How was that okay?

“It is not fucking okay!”

“No, it’s not.” Regina reached out with one hand and wiped Emma’s tears away with her thumb. “But it will be.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because I’m with the Saviour and she’s never let our son down yet.”

Although they were friends, they rarely touched because neither of them was comfortable with any display of affection. There were no kisses on the cheek when they met, or hugs when they parted. They only ever had physical contact when it mattered: to protect the town; to take down an enemy; or to hug their son between them. And that was why the feeling of Regina’s thumb still gently brushing her cheek felt like an invitation Emma couldn’t refuse. She leaned forward until her forehead rested on Regina’s shoulder. It was a few seconds before Regina’s hand moved from her cheek to the back of her neck. She had strong fingers, the pressure firm and reassuring, and Emma wondered if she had comforted Henry like this when he had nightmares.

“This isn’t a nightmare, is it? I’m not going to wake up, am I?”

“No.”

“It’s another stupid fucking magic thing, isn’t it?” Emma didn’t care that she sounded like a petulant child.

“Yes.”

“We’re the only ones here, aren’t we?”

“I think so.”

“And you have no idea how we fix this, have you?”

Regina’s fingers paused momentarily. “No, I don’t.”

Crap.

+

They walked back to Emma’s house, leaving the car where it was because there was no reason to move it. Emma suggested that Regina just poof them clothed and ready but Regina, always the strategist, the planner, had insisted that they shouldn’t waste any magic until they knew what they were up against, and Emma couldn’t argue with that. 

She had a very brief and very cold shower, then she dressed, leaving her bedroom door open a crack so she could fill Regina in on everything that had happened to her since 4am. Meanwhile, Regina investigated Henry’s room and the house for potential clues.

Being clean and dressed, her badge and gun attached to her favourite leather belt, made Emma feel a little better, but it was having Regina there which allowed her to regain her confidence. She didn’t want to be alone in the silence again, and if she could have picked one person to help her face whatever was going on, it would have been Regina. Even if Henry hadn’t been involved, she would have wanted Regina by her side. She didn’t doubt for a moment that Regina would give her life to protect Henry and her. The fact that she didn’t believe the same of her parents or Hook was yet another one of those things she didn’t want to think about too much, because not thinking about them was what helped her get through a normal day. And today was so far from normal, even for Storybrooke.

She finished towelling her hair dry and headed into Henry’s room, where she found Regina sitting on the bed, sizing up the contents of his backpack.

“What’re you up to?”

“I was hoping that there might be traces of magic on his things.” She dropped his science textbook back into the bag with a resigned sigh. “There’s not.”

“Hey, any idea is a good idea right now, and we should explore every one of them.” She flopped down on the bed next to her. “Did you find any clues?”

“No. Whatever this is, I don’t believe it originated here.” Regina pulled her legs up, tucking them to one side as she leaned back against their son’s pillows.

“What about you? What happened to you this morning? When did you work it all out?”

“I woke up and could feel there was something wrong, so I came straight here.”

Emma’s sixth sense for when Regina was lying was having a five-alarm fire. It was after seven when Regina reached her which meant that, even if Emma believed that Regina didn’t get up until six, there was an hour unaccounted for. And Regina wouldn’t wait an hour if she thought there might be something wrong with Henry. She wouldn’t wait twenty seconds for that.

“Are you sure?”

Regina scowled. “I came straight here.”

Okay, old, defensive Regina. Emma hadn’t seen that side of her in a while, but no-one had more experience in dealing with it than she did.

It had taken them over two years to get to the point where they trusted each other again. Okay, not fair, it had taken two and a bit years until it had got to the point where Emma was over her guilt at stealing Regina’s happy ending from her by bringing back her boyfriend’s no-longer-dead wife. Regina, the woman whom some people still saw as evil, had forgiven her a lot more quickly than Emma had forgiven herself. Because, no matter how easy it was for people to see things in terms of good and evil, it felt like Emma’s ‘good’ actions fucked Regina over every single time. She couldn’t understand why Regina kept on forgiving her, when she was just a blundering fool who acted first and thought later and kept on destroying the one person she truly loved. But, man, Regina just took all the shit life dealt her. She took it and took it, never stopped trying to be better, and that kind of inner strength was something which Emma couldn’t even imagine.

She’d got so caught up in her thoughts that she hadn’t noticed Regina staring at her, waiting for her to say something else. She shook her head and grimaced. And then realised that Regina was back to looking breathtaking again. There was no scent of magic in the air, so how the hell did she do that? How could she sit there in a pair of pyjamas and no make-up and look like the most beautiful human being Emma had ever seen?

“When did you have time to freshen up?” she asked before her brain could tell her mouth not to speak.

“Pardon?”

“All this,” Emma waved her hand in Regina’s general direction, “hair and stuff.”

Regina looked confused. “I haven’t done anything.”

“But you—” Look so amazing, she wanted to say, but she couldn’t let comments like that out just because she was feeling over-emotional. Deep breaths. Act normally. “Never mind. Doesn’t matter. So, do we have a plan?”

“I think we should split up and search the town for clues.”

“Not happening.” Emma shook her head.

“Why not?”

“There is no way in hell I’m letting you out of my sight. I’m not having you disappear on me, too. From now on, we stick together, no matter what.”

“Oh. Well, I suppose that makes sense.” Regina twisted her hands in her lap. “But we still need to check everywhere we can. There may be others left behind, and someone might know something. Also, there may still be lingering magic at the site of wherever this spell was cast.”

“You think it’s a spell?”

“I’ve considered everything else and it seems the most likely option. We are the only two with the power to cast a curse or use blood magic, and it’s not a potion, because this is too real to be a hallucination or a glamour, so that leaves a spell. You don’t need particularly strong magic for that, just intent and the right combination of words and objects.”

“Right.” Emma knew next to nothing about spells, but she didn’t want to admit that out loud. “No chance it’s a portal?” She knew a lot about portals.

“No, I would have sensed a portal. There would be residual magic in the air all over town.” Regina picked at the bedspread. “Also, it would take hours for the whole town to pass through, and wouldn’t explain why people appear to have been plucked from their homes.”

“Sleeping curse?”

Regina rolled her eyes. “Do you see any flames licking at your heels, Emma?”

She really needed to pay a lot more attention in Magic 101 in the future, because she had nothing but questions, and no clue as to what they should do.

“So, can you, like, sense the other people with your magic? I know you said that we shouldn’t waste it, but that would seem like a good use to me.”

“You’re the only person I can sense.”

“But if I’m the only one you can sense, what’s the point in looking for others who aren’t here?”

Regina made one of her classic huffing noises. “If there were fifty people in town right now, I wouldn’t know. I could, however, detect you in a crowd of thousands in less than a heartbeat.”

“I’m not following.”

“Evidently.” Regina folded her arms and shook her head, but her tone was amused.

“Maybe you’re not explaining it right.”

“And maybe you’re congenitally hard of thinking.”

Emma chuckled. “You know that means you’re saying Henry’s stupid, too?”

“Thankfully, I had trained the stupid out of him before you got your hands on him.”

“Yeah, but I have him half the time now, so maybe I’m infecting him with my stupidity genes.”

“Impossible, but the fact that you think that genetics work through proximity is further proof of your denseness.”

She grinned at Regina, who had her you’re-an-idiot-but-I-don’t-mind face on. She liked that look. She considered it to be ‘her’ look. And then she realised that they were joking about their son, their son who was not there with them in his bedroom, who had vanished with the rest of the town. Her face fell.

“We’ll get him back, won’t we?”

Regina nodded. “We always have. I have to believe we always will.”


	2. Friday Afternoon/Evening

Dawn never came and the power did not return, both of which made Regina more convinced that they were caught up in a spell of some sort, so the town remained suspended in that curious, silent gloom. 

Emma insisted that they take the police cruiser because someone might try to contact her on the police band of the shortwave radio, but there was no traffic of any kind on the radio or her walkie-talkie, just channel after channel of static. They headed to the mansion first, and Emma checked the house for clues—clues to what, she had no idea, but anything was better than standing around helpless—while Regina got changed. For most of the morning, they remained silent, intent on looking out for anyone, anything at all. Emma hadn’t realised how much she took the background noise of everyday life for granted until it was gone and the only sounds in the whole town came from inside her patrol car. Every breath, every cough, every slight movement of her jacket against the seat back sounded deafening. The few conversations they did have were procedural—left up here, swing back around there again, take the top road out to the town line—because talking about anything else would have made them face up to not having Henry. 

Five hours later, after driving up and down every street in Storybrooke at least twice, Emma reluctantly concluded what they had both suspected from the start: they were alone.

Strangely, Regina was the one who first suggested food. She also suggested the diner, as it offered a good view of the town to watch out for potential developments. Regina magicked them a couple of subs with fries, and soda for Emma, coffee for herself.

“It’s weird being here alone, huh?” Emma said. It felt like breaking and entering, she thought, as they sat facing each other in a booth. In the dark. And the silence.

“If you don’t like the company, you should have said. We can always go our separate ways.” Regina wasn’t being serious, but the part of Emma that understood the pain of not being good enough rushed to dispel the notion all the same.

“Alone in the diner, I meant, when it’s always so full of people we know. There’s no-one else I’d rather be stranded with than you.”

“Not even Killian?”

“As if.”

“Are things okay between you two?” Regina dabbed a napkin at her lips and placed her sandwich down. “Henry hasn’t mentioned him since the drinking incident.” 

When Emma looked up, she saw nothing but concern on Regina’s face, but she didn’t want to talk about Hook, especially not with Regina. Their relationships were generally considered a no-go area between them, except on the most superficial level. Feelings and emotions were definitely off-limits. Emma didn’t want to know if Regina was seeing anyone, and she definitely didn’t want to get into the reasons why she would never be able to commit to Hook. Given their history, truth was a big thing in the Swan-Mills family. They almost never lied to Henry and they tried not to lie outright to each other. Mostly, they managed that by avoiding direct questions and changing the subject when things got too close to the unspoken boundaries they had. The trick, Emma had found, was to hide the truth within something glib.

“He’s a pirate. By now, he’d have knocked over the liquor store and be casing the town for looting and pillaging opportunities.” When Regina didn’t say anything, she pushed on. “But this is our thing, though, isn’t it? Saving the world together. Teaming up to get the hard shit done. We’re a bad-ass combo, fighting magic with magic. We’re, like, cool enough to get our own comic book.”

“Is that so?” Regina gave her a smirk. “You’d have to be the sidekick, of course. Robin to my Batman, as it were.”

“Hey, why do you get to be Batman and I’m stuck with being Robin?” She grinned with relief, because this was a level of conversation she could cope with, even if the use of the name Robin in any context made her uneasy and guilty.

“Well, obviously only one of us looks good while brooding in black leather.”

Shit. That was not an image she wanted in her head, because now all she could picture was Regina in one of those Evil Queen outfits, all tight leather hugging her ass and thighs, insane levels of cleavage on display. And she had already been working extra hard today not to notice that Regina was in that burgundy silk button-down which had always been Emma’s favourite because it showed off a hint of underwear. They were supposed to be focusing on getting their son back, and not on the fact that Emma was alone with the woman she’d been in love with for nearly five years, four if you discounted New York. Why did her mind always have to go there when she didn’t want it to? 

“Emma?”

“What?” She jerked her head up, concentrating hard on not looking at Regina’s tits. It wasn’t easy, because they were incredible, and right there in front of her, and, fuck, being with Regina always made her feel about fifteen. It was worse than usual, though, as if she could barely keep her feelings under control for five minutes.

“You’ve spilled your sandwich on your shirt.” The ‘again’ went unsaid, but they could both hear it.

Emma looked down to see a large orange glob seeping into the cotton of her Henley. And, for some reason, that made her sigh because Regina was the only person who ever remembered that she liked chipotle and arugula on a cold roast beef sandwich, never iceberg and mayo. With a quick flick of Regina’s wrist, the stain disappeared.

“All better,” Regina said. 

Except it wasn’t.

+

They were at the convent because the new plan, now that they’d established that there was no-one else left in Storybrooke, was to go to everywhere they could think of where there had been magic-related incidents in the past. Obviously, both their homes had been thoroughly checked out that morning, and they’d already swung by Emma’s parents’ place and Gold’s pawn shop and the well.

They were doing a room-to-room search, but so far nothing had turned up at all, and Emma was starting to get frustrated. The bedrooms were all identical and all exactly as she had expected nuns’ rooms to be: a bed, a desk, a wardrobe, a crucifix, not much else. She’d lifted a couple of mattresses, but hadn’t found so much as a copy of Us Weekly, never mind something mildly interesting, like a spell book or a treasure map or porn.

“Anything?” she called out.

“No, and there’s no fairy dust at all.” Regina’s voice from inside the room startled her. She turned around to find Regina propped against the desk with a pensive scowl.

“So?” She folded her arms across her chest and leaned back against the wall behind her.

“Even if they’d locked it away or buried it underground or, I don’t know, tossed it into the Atlantic, there should still be traces everywhere. Fairy dust, by its very nature, is hard to eradicate. Particles adhere to things, find their way into the cracks in wood, get trapped between flagstones.” Regina was drumming her nails against the desk, her other hand kneading the back of her neck.

“What do you think that means?” Emma wasn’t following what Regina was thinking. Again.

“I don’t know, but it means something.” She sighed. “I haven’t felt Storybrooke so devoid of magic since before you arrived.”

Emma grinned. “The good old days, huh?”

“I’m not sure I’d call them that.” Regina’s gaze was almost fond. “But the absence of magic is important to all of this somehow.”

“Maybe the spell was to purge Storybrooke of all magic?” She’d no sooner said it than she wished she hadn’t, because she saw the flicker of pain across Regina’s face, and that immediately conjured images of Regina strapped to a gurney in the cannery, and Greg Mendell—no, Owen Flynn, his name was Owen Flynn, her mind supplied—trying to electrocute the magic right out of her. 

Losing Neal through a portal, thinking him dead, had been nothing in comparison to the thought that she might lose Regina that day. It forced her to admit that she was in love with Regina Mills, and had been for some time. She couldn’t continue to dismiss her feelings as a combination of understandable lust—because Regina was crazy hot and anyone with eyes and a pulse would want her—and protectiveness from promising Henry that she’d always keep his mother safe. She’d picked Regina up in her arms and promised whatever deities might be listening that she would give everything she had, anything except Henry, if only Regina could be okay.

It was a day she didn’t want either of them to have to think about and she shook her head in silent apology. Regina cleared her throat and nodded, wordlessly reassuring her that it was okay.

“If the plan were to rid Storybrooke of all magic,” Regina said, “then we are the ones who should have disappeared along with the rest of the magic. But we are here, and we still have our magic. It’s everyone and everything else which is gone.”

“Then what is the point of taking the people and the magic away but leaving us here?”

Regina nodded. “That is the very question we need to answer.”

+

They kept looking for clues, long after they both knew that they should give up for the night because they were tired and wired and getting nowhere. Again, Regina was the one to finally call it a day and said, “It’s nearly ten o’clock. We should go home and rest and eat.”

“But—” Henry was still out there, or not out there. Henry was not with them.

“I know.” Regina placed her hand over Emma’s on the steering wheel. “We’re not letting him down by accepting that we need to rest up for a while. We’re not giving up. We’re just gathering our strength while we plan what comes next.”

“And what does come next?”

“We’ll know that once we’ve planned it.” Regina smiled, but it didn’t reach her eyes. She squeezed Emma’s fingers and then withdrew her hand, leaning her head against the passenger window and shutting her eyes. Out of instinct, Emma turned the cruiser in the direction of Mifflin Street, and was surprised when Regina said, “When I said home, I meant your house.”

She pulled the car around and drove them there in silence, thinking about all the ways Regina and home were the same concept for her. The day she got her memories back in New York, her first image had been of Regina—not Neal or her parents or anyone else, just Regina—and her heart had told her ‘home’. But she hadn’t had time to do anything about it before suddenly there was Regina with Robin Hood and she’d seemed so happy with him. So, Emma had sucked it up and tried to concentrate on the battle at hand because there was always a battle at hand in Storybrooke, the least peaceful small town in Maine. And then Hook told her that he had given up the Jolly Roger for her. He wasn’t Regina, but he seemed like he wanted to make her happy, and, frankly, that hadn’t seemed like such a bad thing. It was hardly even an hour later when Robin met Marian again and it all went to shit.

They were their own little family now, Regina and Emma and Henry, and maybe it would never be everything her heart yearned for, but it was better than anything she could have imagined when she was stuck in the foster system or pregnant and alone in prison. These days, whenever she thought of home, she thought of her own house and the Sunday evenings when she, Regina and Henry ate together as a family. When they first started the tradition, the three of them played a board game or watched a movie together. Now that he was fifteen, Henry usually went to his room immediately after dinner and the two women talked, sometimes for hours. It was the highlight of Emma’s week, and she was quite happy to abuse her position as Sheriff to make sure that she was the only member of the Storybrooke police force who never had to work a Sunday evening. 

As soon as they reached the house, Regina made herself busy preparing them a meal from whatever food she could find in the fridge and cupboards, while Emma looked among the junk in the spare bedroom for extra candles. 

Returning to the kitchen, she got herself a beer and poured Regina a glass of wine. They went over what they had found that day, which was, as Emma put it, the square root of fuck-all. The only new information they had was that there was zero magic left in town, and they didn’t know what that meant. They still had nothing but Regina’s working theory that they were caught up in a spell. There were no clues as to where the people had gone, where Henry—their beautiful son, their one good thing—was. With not much else to go on, they had no great plan for the following day, except to continue on their rounds of ‘places where magic shit happened’, which was about half the town, by Emma’s reckoning.

“I think we should sleep in shifts, four hours apiece,” Emma said, as she pushed back her chair, having finished their late supper. As ever, what Regina could produce from a few cans and a bit of salad was better than anything Emma had ever eaten in a restaurant. “That way, one of us is always awake, just in case anything happens during the night. You can go first, if you like.”

Regina shook her head. “You were the one who was awake at 4am. You should go first.”

“Nah. You know me, made of steel. Honestly, go on. Take the bed in my room, and I’ll stay out here. I don’t have anything like your fine silk pyjamas, but I’m sure I can scare up a pair of yoga pants and a t-shirt.” She noticed Regina biting her lip, holding something back. “What?”

Regina looked down and away, her eyes tightening in that way they always did when she had something she didn’t want to admit.

“Could I, would it be okay if, if we—” Regina exhaled loudly, as if whatever she was about to say required extra effort on her part.

Emma suppressed a grin because, for once today, she had a fair idea of what Regina was trying to say, and the woman was nothing if not adorable when she was trying to avoid directly asking for something she didn’t think she should want in the first place. Emma was a big girl. She could take one for the team.

“Actually, you know what? If it’s okay with you, I think it would be better if I brought some blankets through here and we shared the couch. I’m not sure we can entirely rule out the possibility of even more weird shit happening during the night, so it’s probably better if we stay close to each other.”

“If that’s what you think is best.” The relief on Regina’s face, and the shy smile which went with it, was more than worth Emma’s effort.

+

They talked for a short while after getting settled on the couch, but it didn’t take long for Regina’s eyes to start drooping, so Emma tucked the blankets in around her and told her to get some sleep. Emma retrieved a book from her bedroom, and sat down at the far end of the couch, chuckling to herself when Regina’s feet suddenly appeared in her lap. She placed her hand on Regina’s shin and gently stroked back and forth with her palm, earning a small grunt of what she assumed was approval. She settled back into the silence, opened her book to the last-read page and tried not to think about falling asleep.

It was only around 1am when she heard a sleepy voice ask, “Why did you stop?”

“Stop what?” She looked up from her book, but Regina’s head was buried in a mess of blankets and pillows. One of the feet in her lap wiggled, and she realised that she’d transferred her paperback to her right hand, the left resting on the arm of the couch. She shifted her position, dropping the book to the floor and putting her hand on the curve of Regina’s ankle. “Apologies, Your Majesty.”

A few minutes later, there was a disgruntled noise followed by the rustling of blankets, and she turned to see a scowling Regina pushing the covers away from her face.

“You’ve got a couple of hours yet. Go back to sleep.”

“No point. I’m awake now.” Regina pushed herself up into a seated position. She didn’t move her feet from Emma’s lap, though.

“Sorry.” She wasn’t really. Seeing Regina all sleep-tousled and wearing her clothes was, well, all kinds of hot, just like every other version of Regina—soccer mom, power-suited Mayor, casual witch-about-town—was hot.

“It’s not your fault. I’m not a great sleeper at the best of times. No rest for the wicked, and all that.” She gave a self-deprecating shrug, and Emma shook her head at the weak joke.

“D’you want something to drink?”

“How were you planning on achieving that?”

“I’m quite capable of heating water or milk in a pan.”

“Without burning the kitchen down? I doubt that.” Regina smirked and, with a flourish of her wrist, two mugs appeared on the coffee table, one of black coffee next to Regina and one of cocoa beside Emma.

“Honestly, you explode one toaster in this town,” Emma muttered, reaching for her drink.

“How many times have the fire department been called to this house since you moved in?”

“Only like twice! Okay, maybe three times.”

“Which is three times more than they’ve been to my home in thirty years.”

“Yeah, well, I saved you from a fire once.”

Regina’s face softened and she gave a wry chuckle. “Yes. Yes, you did, didn’t you?”

Emma sipped her hot chocolate, which had extra whipped cream, half a teaspoon of raw sugar and the perfect amount of cinnamon. Like her sandwiches, Regina was the only one who knew how to make it right. She felt a slight pressure against her thigh, Regina’s heel digging in to get her attention, and realised that she had moved her hands again. She raised an eyebrow at Regina, wanting her to ask this time. Regina made a fine attempt at staring her down, trying to get her to comply with just intimidation, but Emma was determined not to cave so easily.

“I find it calming,” Regina finally admitted after a few moments of staring, and it was probably as near to a request as she was going to get. Emma wriggled her free hand back under the blankets, this time resting just above Regina’s knee, and there was a tiny sigh in response, a noise of contentment. 

Sitting there in Emma’s too-big tank top, the candlelight catching the side of her face, Regina was breathtaking. Maybe it was foolish to imagine that this was what their life could have been if things had worked out differently, to picture evenings spent bundled up together on the couch in casual domestic intimacy, but Emma was enjoying the feeling enough not to care about getting burned by indulging her idle fantasies. 

“Can I ask you something?”

“I don’t know if you can, but you certainly may.”

Emma rolled her eyes. “Do you know you’ve got Henry doing that, too? It’s driving me insane.”

Regina chuckled. “If you learned the difference between could and might, then it wouldn’t be an issue.”

Ignoring the whole semantics debate, Emma said, “What did you mean earlier when you said that I’m the only person you can sense?”

Regina blew on her coffee, which Emma immediately recognised as a stalling tactic. She was the god of stalling tactics, after all, equally as adept at avoidance and obfuscation. Knowing Regina, she was thinking through how she was going to phrase whatever she wanted to convey by saying only what she was willing to share. Emma got that. Their communication was often as much about the spaces in between as it was about what they actually said.

“I can always sense you.” She paused and took another drink, but Emma didn’t fill the silence. “Since before Neverland, I have always been able to sense you.”

“My magic?”

“Yes.” The slight narrowing of Regina’s eyes and pursing of her lips told Emma that it was more than that.

“What’s it like?”

Regina furrowed her brow. “You know what your magic feels like.”

Emma’s voice dropped to a whisper. “No, what does it feel like to feel my magic like that?”

“It’s, I don’t know, I’m so used to it now that it’s just a part of me. But I suppose the best way to describe it is like a warmth in my chest. It’s like I can feel you, here.” Regina made a fist and placed it in the centre of her ribcage, below her breasts, and Emma tried not to think about the fact that Regina wasn’t wearing a bra under her tank top, but the motion pulled the cotton tight and Emma couldn’t look away. “It’s there all the time, but it’s stronger and warmer when we’re together.”

Emma knew that feeling, or something like it. For her, it had nothing to do with magic, and everything to do with how she felt about the other woman. As she lifted her eyes from Regina’s chest to her face, she caught the knowing glance the other woman gave her, but what was she going to do? Regina was gorgeous, and Emma always looked, just because she could. Regina would never call her on it, not really. She had seen the way Regina’s eyes traced over her arms at times, and she had never called her on that either, although she made sure that she did chin-ups every morning.

“What about after the second curse? Could you feel it when you were in the Enchanted Forest?”

“No.” Regina looked away for a second. “Although, there were times, I thought—” She shrugged.

“You thought what?”

“It wasn’t the same. Obviously, I could no longer sense you, but sometimes it was as if I had a really strong sense of you. And Henry, of course.” 

“Of course,” she agreed, smiling and nodding at Regina in a way that said she knew the Henry bit was another of those little white lies which she was willing to let slide. When Regina shrugged in reply as she took another drink of coffee, Emma decided to keep pushing. “When?”

“At night, mostly. It was,” she waved her hand as if trying to pluck the correct word from the air, “fanciful, I suppose.”

She looked embarrassed to have admitted it. There was something seductive about the dark which made you want to spill your deepest secrets, Emma knew. It was part of the reason that she never, ever spent the night with someone: the desire to say things which couldn’t be unsaid snuck up on you in the night, tempted you to admit what would never be spoken in crisp sunlight.

“Maybe, maybe not. The whole time we were in New York, I was happy. We were happy.” She had wanted to go back there with Henry, when she had thought it was going to be Regina and Robin and Roland, and she didn’t know how she could cope with seeing that every day. But Storybrooke was home. Regina, even if she was only her friend, was home. Emma stared down at her mug. “But there were still nights when I wondered if there was something wrong with me, because I didn’t feel complete, like there was this hollow part of me that needed to be filled.” She waited for a crack about missing her magic or her parents or Hook or something else, but it never came. 

“It was a long year,” Regina said, her subdued tone indicating that this particular conversation was over.

They went back to saying nothing, sipping at their drinks, but it wasn’t uncomfortable. In fact, it was one of the things Emma loved most about their complicated relationship: that she could be still around Regina. So many people wanted so many things from her, but only Regina ever let her just be. Their only communication for the next few minutes was a series of half-smiles and raised eyebrows and little nods. They had stepped beyond their unspoken limits again, but they were okay with it.

“You’re still dressed,” Regina finally said, putting her mug down on the coffee table.

“I didn’t want to get too comfy and fall asleep.”

“Go get changed. Sleep.”

“It’s still your turn.”

“Do as you’re told for once, Emma.” 

Regina’s eyes were soft and pleading, not demanding, and Emma couldn’t fight that, not when Regina had said her name that way she sometimes did, drawing out the two syllables like she was still testing how it felt to call her something other than Miss Swan. Not that it wasn’t hot when Regina called her Miss Swan, because Emma had some very specific fantasies about being ordered around by Regina, but there was little she wouldn’t do for Regina when she said her name like that in that low, husky voice. She could feel her cheeks starting to redden, and she hoped that she’d get away with it in the dim light, but a quick side glance confirmed that Regina was watching her carefully. And, yeah, she was fucked.

“Right, I’ll just go, you know, whatever.” She scrambled off the couch with as much composure as she could muster, knocking her shin against the low coffee table. Smooth moves, Swan. Smooth moves.

She hummed and hawed over what to wear, finally settling on a mis-matched pair of plaid pyjama pants and an old v-necked t-shirt with the sleeves ripped off. She might be terrified of their current intimacy, but she still wanted Regina to look. She ducked into the bathroom to brush her teeth and to kill a little more time. She put the toilet seat down and sat on top of it, trying to get control of her jangling nerves. She couldn’t hide in there all night, though, so she went back through to the living room, only to come to a dead halt as she saw that Regina was sitting upright and had rearranged the pillow so that it was propped against her thigh. Emma would have to sleep with her head almost in Regina’s lap. The blankets were tucked into the back of the couch and folded back invitingly.

Not remotely prepared for how to handle this, she nodded at the book in Regina’s hand and said, “I, uh, would never have figured you for a Stephen King fan.”

Regina raised an eyebrow at the fact that Emma was standing in her own living room, anxiously shifting her body weight from foot to foot. “In general, I prefer his short stories.”

“I’ve got a few of those, if you want. In fact, I’ve got all of his stuff. I’m not sure what else I’ve got in short stories, but there’s Clive Barker, if horror’s your thing.” God, she hoped her mouth would stop flapping at some point. “And I’ve got some Arthur Machen and Poe, if you want to go really old school—”

“Emma,” Regina interrupted, doing the syllable thing which would always be Emma Swan’s Kryptonite, “lie down and get some sleep.”

“Yeah, uh, right.”

Cautiously, she slipped under the covers and eased her head back onto the pillow. By inclining her head back a few inches, she could look up at Regina, who was focused on the book in her right hand. Her lips were pursed in a smile, knowing she was being watched, and it filled Emma’s heart with sadness that this woman would never be hers.

Without taking her eyes off the page, Regina placed her fingertips on Emma’s temple and gently pushed her head to the side until she was no longer staring. Emma closed her eyes and shifted a little, turning more onto her side, facing towards the kitchen area. She was very aware of how close the back of her head was to Regina’s stomach and the fact that Regina’s hand was still hovering above her. And then those strong, reassuring fingers threaded themselves through her hair, cradling the back of her head, fingertips resting on Emma’s neck just below her ear.

“Sleep, Emma,” Regina murmured.

She did.


	3. Saturday Morning/Afternoon

“You know what’s weird?” Emma kicked at a rock as they approached the entrance to the mine. After the failsafe, the caves had been sealed up again, and then re-opened so that the dwarves could mine fairy dust to protect the town from some random apocalypse of the day, and then resealed after yet another landslide had nearly killed someone else’s kid. The only way in now was via the mine shaft, behind barbed wire and fences and about ninety locks. Mayor Mills was very strong on security.

“Other than the dark, the silence and almost everything about the last twenty-four hours, you mean?”

“Yeah, apart from that.” She looked around, thinking about the day she had saved Henry there. She had nearly kissed Regina that day. She had wanted to so badly, she’d hardly been able to look away from Regina’s mouth. Another missed opportunity. “What’s weird is that everything is too clean.”

“Meaning?” Regina unlocked yet another padlock with the huge ring of what looked like jailer’s keys she was carrying and opened the final gate, passing the keys to Emma. Because, yeah, of course Regina wasn’t about to get down on her hands and knees to open the grate over the elevator shaft. 

Emma rubbed the back of her neck, peering down and wondering how she was going to get back up if the generator had been affected by the power black-out. It should be fine, because it ran on gasoline and their cars were working, but she didn’t fancy having to climb back up the rope slung over her shoulder.

“Well, I should have thought about it before, but the houses were immaculate.” She sighed. It had been tugging at her mind all morning, something her bounty hunter instincts would have told her the day before if she hadn’t been consumed by fear for Henry and Regina. “The Carpenters across the road, they’ve got three kids under eight, but there wasn’t so much as a teddy bear lying around.” She stood up, looking around for the elevator’s control panel.

“There were no toys?” 

“No, there were toys, but they were in the kids’ rooms.” She found the controller and pressed the large green button. Nothing happened. “Fuck.” Her shoulders slumped. “Right, well, it looks like I’m doing this the hard way.” She hefted the rope from her shoulder and sized up the metal frame over the shaft, wondering where best to attach it.

“We’re doing this the hard way. Not you. We.”

Emma glared over her shoulder. “There is no way you’re coming with me.” She dropped her eyes down to Regina’s boots. “You’ll break your neck in those.”

Regina rolled her eyes. “I’ll have you know that I could climb mountains in these. Mountains.”

“Good for you, Edmund Hillary, but I’m not letting you risk it.” She fastened the rope to a supporting beam, tugging on it to check that it would hold her. She hoped she looked like she knew what she was doing, but, really, she had no idea.

“You are not the boss of me, Emma Swan.”

Emma pulled herself up to her full height, squaring her shoulders and giving her best hard stare. “I’m still the Sheriff.”

“And I’m the Mayor, so that makes me the boss of you.”

Oh, and, there it was again, the mental image of Regina ordering her around. A very naked Regina ordering her around. No, maybe in those boots and some lingerie. A corset? Emma folded her arms and let her eyes trail over Regina, thinking about the pros and cons of naked versus lingerie. To be fair, either worked for her.

She didn’t even notice Regina moving towards her until one hand grasped her shoulder and the other slipped behind her back. Before she could even think about how to react, her stomach lurched as they disappeared and reappeared inside the mine itself. Regina let her go immediately, and Emma pitched forward, only just stopping herself from face-planting.

“Little warning next time, maybe?”

“And where would be the fun in that?” Regina turned on her heel and started walking further into the mine. 

How the woman managed to walk anywhere in those heels was beyond Emma, but she’d always appreciated the way they made her legs look. Regina had great legs, and a fine, fine ass, especially in a pair of Emma’s jeans, borrowed that morning. There was something about the woman she wanted so much wearing her clothes which appealed to Emma’s possessive side. She watched Regina for a few more seconds before trotting after her. Because Regina Mills was, indeed, the boss of her.

“So, the toys,” she said, picking up the previous conversation as she reached Regina’s side. “They were in the kids’ bedrooms, all piled up in boxes and stuff. But they didn’t look like anyone had played with them in forever. And all the other houses were the same. I mean, if people had been pulled from their homes in the night, shouldn’t there be, like, stuff lying around?”

“We can’t all be as negligent in our housework as you.”

“Yeah, whatever. It’s not that they were tidy. It’s that they looked like they’d never needed tidying because nothing had ever been moved.” She frowned. “Does that make sense?”

Regina stopped walking and turned to her. “No.”

“Did you ever see those atomic bomb films of the fifties? Or the Twilight Zone?” She tried to think of a reference that Regina might understand. “Oh! Pompeii. Have you seen the ruins at Pompeii on the History Channel?”

“What are you talking about?”

“In the movies, people are always caught out in the middle of stuff when the lava hits or the atomic bomb goes off or whatever. Like, there’s still dirty dishes in the sink and clothes get melted into the carpet or they’re mummified in their beds because they didn’t know the bad thing was coming until it was too late. But, even when they have advance warning to cut and run before the shit hits the fan, not once do you ever see them taking the time to clean up after themselves just so that, a couple of hundred years later, some archeologists can comment on how nice they kept their homes.”

“And the houses you went into yesterday?” Regina was stroking her fingers across her lips thoughtfully, which sent Emma off on thoughts of kissing. And sucking. Biting. Licking. She shook her head, trying to dispel her increasingly x-rated thoughts.

“They look like they were put together by an interior designer and never touched since. Even your house isn’t that tidy.”

“My home is spotless.”

“So not the point!” She threw her hands up. “Their doors weren’t locked. And I know you people are all old-school about ‘back in the Enchanted Forest, no-one had to lock their doors because all your neighbours were your friends’, but I’m pretty sure that people lock their doors here.”

“I always locked my doors. My castle was an impenetrable fortress.”

“Yeah, I remember your dungeons. Not that impenetrable.” And, shit, why did she have to go there, because that’s when she had found Marian and brought her back to Storybrooke to be reunited with her husband, Regina’s fucking boyfriend, Robin. She glanced up, expecting to see the hurt to pass across Regina’s face in remembrance of everything Emma had taken from her. But Regina looked far from sad.

“Hmm.” Regina smiled as she looked Emma up and down, teeth bared and eyebrow raised, just as the Evil Queen had when Emma was passing herself off as Princess Leia. “Perhaps I should have followed my first instinct and had you sent to my quarters. You would never have escaped from there.”

Emma’s eyes widened because that couldn’t possibly mean what she thought it meant. Could it? Regina had thought about taking Emma to her bedroom? No, not possible. She hadn’t even looked like herself to anyone but Hook. Except, maybe, Regina was magic and she was magic and did that mean that Regina had seen the real Emma? No, even if she had, the Evil Queen wouldn’t have known Emma Swan back then anyway. It was much more likely that Regina was just fucking with her, trying to mess with her head. The Evil Queen probably had all her prisoners sent to her quarters for interrogation of the non-carnal kind. Yeah, that was it. Good old-fashioned torture, and not the hours and hours of sweaty, grinding, dirty, multi-orgasmic, amazing sex which Emma was now picturing.

“Come now, let’s look for this fairy dust,” Regina said, walking away again. “Although, if what you’ve just said is true, then I suspect we’re wasting our time here.”

+

They had been wasting their time. There was no fairy dust in the caves. 

Regina poofed them back to the surface, to the still-creepy half-light and total silence, and they locked everything up again, although it occurred to Emma that it was a wasted effort when there was no-one left to protect.

They were sitting in someone’s kitchen. Regina, who knew everyone in town by both their Enchanted Forest and Storybrooke names, had told her whose, but she hadn’t really been listening. They’d been through a few homes to confirm Emma’s conclusions, and they had been no different to her neighbours’. Every floor and surface was devoid of clutter; beds were made with military precision; even the trash cans were empty.

Regina had been brooding at the table for minutes in silence, drinking a coffee which she’d made from—well, Emma assumed magic, but she didn’t really know. Emma was picking at her nails and tracing patterns on the linoleum with her toe of her boot and trying not to stare at Regina’s tits again. She was losing that particular battle quite splendidly, especially since her mind was still racing with scenarios to do with being ordered to the Evil Queen’s bedchambers.

“It has to be a facsimile,” Regina said.

“Huh?”

“A facsimile, an almost identical copy.”

“Yeah, I know what facsimile means. Unlike you, I lived through the nineties and actually used a fax machine.”

Regina ignored her. “Someone has gone to a lot of trouble to create an exact replica of the town and banished us to it.”

“Banished us?”

“Can you think of any other reason why we are the only two here, other than we are the only two intended to be here?”

“Um, because we’re magic and we got pulled here by mistake?”

“That’s not even possible. Your childish belief that magic can happen by accident continues to astound me. Have you ever read any of those books on magic that I’ve given you?”

“Hey, I read a lot of things. Just not them.” She shrugged. “My magic works when I really need it to, and that’s all I need to know.”

Regina reached out and put her hand over Emma’s. “You have nothing to be scared of, you know. Your magic is quite disgustingly pure. Knowing how to control it properly and understanding everything you can do with it will not somehow turn you dark like me.”

“Her.” She shook her head because there was a limit to the amount of self-deprecation she could accept from Regina. “The Evil Queen had dark magic. And she’s not you.”

Regina removed her hand, bristling, but trying to hide it behind stoicism. “I am still her. She is still me.”

“Like fuck she is!” Emma pushed the chair from the table and stood, turning away in frustration for a second before shaking her head and continuing. “You beat your own sister with light magic. Light! Because you’re good. Because there’s so much fucking good and love inside you, and I can see it every minute of every day, even if you can’t. Do you know what the Evil Queen would have done to me for bringing her soulmate’s wife back and destroying her happy ending? She’d have tortured me for months, maybe years, and then ended my life. She would have brought me nothing but pain and misery and horror. She would have ruined me and my whole family.”

She didn’t know why she was saying these things. They never spoke about Robin, and now she’d brought him up twice in one day. Regina might have forgiven her, but that didn’t mean it was a safe area for conversation. But there had been something in the air between them since they’d been stuck wherever they were. Emma might not know much about magic, and she had to take Regina’s word that there was none there except what they had within them, but something was pushing their emotions to their surface. At first, she had blamed it on the dark, on the way it pulled your secrets from you, but this was more than that. She felt like every feeling she had ever had was burning her skin, desperate to get out, and she couldn’t hold it back.

“But that’s not what you did. You kept your anger to yourself. And you let me have my so-called happy ending with Henry and Hook, even while yours was in tatters, even while Robin and Marian’s happiness was thrown in your face every fucking day. You’ve saved our son. You’ve saved me. You were willing to give your heart to save my father to stop my mother’s heart from breaking too, and you claim to actually hate both of them. You keep on saving this town and the people in it. That doesn’t sound very evil to me, Regina. That sounds a lot like what a good person would do. That sounds a lot like fucking love.”

She jerked her head back as the coffee cup sailed past her, its contents raining down on her jacket before it smashed against the kitchen wall.

“Don’t.” Regina marched from the kitchen, hurt in her eyes and trails of pale smoke curling around her fingers.

+

After taking some time to calm down, Emma stepped outside the house and let herself feel where Regina was. It wasn’t difficult. She walked slowly to the docks, her hands in her pockets, feet and heart heavy.

She couldn’t believe how quickly things had gone straight to shit yet again. It hadn’t even been three hours since she had woken up in Regina’s lap, her face snuggled against her belly, and Regina’s hand still cradling the back of her head. And it had been the best six hours’ sleep of her life. Before she’d even had a chance to be embarrassed about their positions, Regina had cupped her cheek and whispered, “I’ll make breakfast.”

God, she had been so happy, watching Regina move around the open-plan living area, making coffee and conjuring up toasted onion bagels. Onion bagels, because cinnamon was for drinks and desserts, and not for breakfast foods, and, again, Regina was the only person who seemed to know that. Even David bought her cinnamon and raisin, and she didn’t like cinnamon and raisin bagels, but she always ate them because it was enough that her father wanted to make her breakfast. And she’d thought about the warmth in her chest, the feeling she always got with Regina close by, and Regina’s comment from the previous evening that she felt something similar.

It was strange that it had never occurred to her before that the intensity she felt in her heart around Regina was because of magic. It should have. It was Storybrooke, and they were Emma and Regina. Magic had been pushing them together since before Emma was even born. For once, though, she had wanted her life to be a choice she’d made for herself. As wrong as it was to feel the way she did about Regina, when she had caused her almost nothing but pain since they’d first met, she had wanted the feeling to be about love and nothing else. She just wanted to love someone who wasn’t Henry out of something other than magic or obligation.

She loved her parents, and she loved Hook, but it took effort, and a huge part of why she loved them was because she felt she owed them it in return for the care they showed her. It had never been that way with Regina. In fact, it was entirely the opposite: she loved Regina despite trying very hard not to, despite having to put ever-increasing amounts of effort into hiding that love. And she knew, somewhere inside, that Regina loved her, too—maybe only as a friend or an ally or Henry’s other mother, but Regina cared for her deeply. The difference was that Regina never sought or expected anything in return for the love she gave either Henry or Emma. In fact, Emma was fairly sure that Regina actually expected pain in return, which made her love even more selfless.

She wished that they weren’t in squeaky-clean Fake Storybrooke, because she was itching to lash out at something, to drop-kick a can into the ocean, to punt some trash high into the air. Even as she was thinking it, she laughed, because she somehow always forgot that she had magic. She held out her right hand and concentrated until a perfect baseball—white and shining, like they used for batting practice in the major leagues—appeared there. She ran a few yards and sent it sailing, chasing after it when it landed in the wet grass ahead. When she reached it, she dribbled it with her feet for a bit, then picked it up, flexing her fingers around it, tossing and catching it a few times. She remembered the foster homes when she had to play on her own, kicking and throwing balls against the nearest wall because there was no-one to return them to her. 

Only she wasn’t alone here. She had Regina. And she wasn’t alone back in real Storybrooke, because she had more family than she could cope with there.

She saw Regina up ahead, sitting on the bench where Emma had known she’d be even without magic tugging her in the right direction. She tucked the ball in her jacket pocket and walked more purposefully, stopping a few feet from the other woman. Regina had been crying, her face streaked with drying tears—tears caused by Emma, yet again.

“I’m sorry.” She squeezed the baseball tightly. “For everything.”

“It’s the spell,” Regina said. “It’s heightening our emotions.”

“Yeah. Figured that.” She approached the bench cautiously, looking for any sign that her presence was not welcome. When she saw none, she perched on the edge, pulling the baseball out and holding it between her hands. She leaned forward and dipped her head, her thumbnail tracing over red stitching. “It’s not just that bit I’m sorry for.”

“We don’t have to talk about it.” Regina turned her face away, staring out to sea.

“I kinda think we do.”

“I disagree.”

“I know.”

“I—”

“Yeah, no, look, I’m sorry, but I have to say this.” She glanced sideways at Regina and then back to the baseball. She couldn’t say any of what she needed to say while she could see those tears. “I never wanted to make you unhappy, you know, not even at the start. Back then, I thought I was doing what was best for the kid because I didn’t know that you were already what was best for him.”

“Not then I wasn’t,” Regina said softly, and shrugged for interrupting.

“Yeah, but you were. You’re the good Mom and everything I do right now, I got from you, from the memories you gave me, because I’d have him eating candy for breakfast and pizza for lunch and playing tag with the cars on the freeway or something.” She turned the ball over a few times in her hands. “You gave us everything. And, fuck, I can see that you just keep giving to us, and we just keep hurting you.” She shook her head. “That’s not fair. Not Henry, not since New York. Me. I’m the one who just keeps on hurting you. And I need to own that, even though I don’t mean to hurt you at all. In fact, it’s the last thing in the world I want to do. And I am so sorry, Regina. I am so sorry for all of it.” She leaned back and exhaled slowly, staring up at the sky. 

“I really wanted you to have that happy ending, you know? Robin and Roland and the whole thing. You deserve true love and soulmates and happily-ever-after. And it eats me up inside that I’m the one who took that all away. Because I’m honestly just making shit up as I go along. I still don’t get what it is I’m actually meant to be doing, and somehow that ends up with you getting fucked over.”

“You didn’t know who she was when you saved her, Emma.”

She shook her head. “No, don’t excuse me like that. I didn’t know because I didn’t ask. I was so convinced that I was doing the right thing that it never even occurred to me.”

“A family trait you inherited from your mother, I’m afraid. I can hardly blame you for that.”

Emma growled in frustration. “Would you please, for the love of God, stop interrupting when I am trying to apologise here?”

“If you had known who she was, you would still have saved her because that’s what Saviours do. The clue is in the name.”

“But I hurt you.”

“You didn’t do it on purpose, and I have survived much, much worse.”

“Yeah, all caused by me and my family!”

Regina slapped Emma’s shoulder. “Don’t flatter yourself. There are things I have done, things for which I can never fully atone, even if I lived a hundred lifetimes. Some of them are bound to catch up with me from time to time. Not everything is about you or your sainted mother.”

“How can you be so calm about all of this? How can you be so fucking forgiving? I took your happiness.”

“And you gave me my greatest happiness when you gave me Henry.”

“And I keep taking him from you!”

“So far, you’ve always brought him back.”

“Stop arguing with my apology!”

“I will when you stop martyring yourself. It is one of your least attractive traits.”

“Jesus, woman, you’re infuriating.”

“That’s hardly news.”

Emma turned her head sideways and caught Regina’s grin. “I’m trying to be sincere, and you’re kind of ruining it.”

“I know you are, but I forgave you for the whole Robin and Marian thing a long time ago, which is why we didn’t need to have this conversation in the first place. Do you want me to be angry at you, Emma? Because I fail to see what purpose that would serve. I was hurt and disappointed, but I got over it. I’ve moved on. You’re the one who won’t let it go. You’re the one who makes it this thing between us.”

She was right, of course. Robin had been a turning point for Emma, and she still resented the hell out of the guy for coming into their lives. If there had been no Robin, then Emma might have found the courage to tell Regina how she felt about her. She certainly wouldn’t have given into Hook’s persistence. Robin Hood, Prince of Fucking Thieves, was the reason that she was stuck, half-heartedly, in a relationship she didn’t want. But, if Robin had made Regina happy, then she would have at least had that consolation. She wanted Regina to be happy, because at least if she was happy, then every stupid thing Emma had done would be made good in some small way. But, no, she had ruined it for everyone by bringing Marian back. And now she had Hook, which wasn’t what she wanted, and Regina had no-one, which wasn’t what she wanted, either. And she couldn’t let it go. She couldn’t get past it.

“Why do you keep forgiving me, when all I ever do is hurt you?”

“Oh, Emma, that’s not all you ever do for me.”

She sat up again, staring down at her baseball. “So, why’d you run off? If you’re not angry with me, why’d you storm out?”

“Because this spell, this whatever, is obviously enhancing our emotions, pushing extreme feelings to the surface, and I didn’t want us to get into a situation where one of us did something completely unforgivable.”

Emma shook her head. It was an entirely plausible reason, but didn’t explain the tears for a start, or that Regina had been angry enough for magic to appear at her fingertips. Calling Regina a liar, however, right after trying to apologise to her for repeatedly ruining her life, didn’t seem like the best plan.

“We should avoid big emotional stuff, then?”

“We should at least try to get along without resorting to flying crockery.” 

Emma chuckled. “I can’t believe you threw a cup at my head.”

“And I can’t believe my aim was so poor that I missed, but there you go.” Regina patted the back of Emma’s hand. Emma shot her an accusing glance, but grinned in reply anyway.

“What do we do now?”

“We keep looking. This spell is incomplete. The parts that are not quite right, like the darkness and the silence and the lack of electricity, tell us as much. We should probably head out to the town lines, see if there are any ripples at the edges which we can push through.”

“That’s a thing?”

“Yes, Emma, that’s a thing. Which you would know if you’d read those books I gave you. A spell is like a blanket, and we need to find its frayed edges.” Regina stood and smoothed her clothes down, composing herself. She nodded her head back towards town. “Shall we?”

Emma nodded and got up from the bench, tucking her baseball back into her pocket. They had only got a few feet when something occurred to her.

“So, what are my most attractive traits, then?” she asked.

That one made Regina smile, even though she tried to suppress it. “Now you’re just pushing it.”

+

They headed for the town line, looking for holes in the fabric of the spell, as Regina had suggested. What they found was a ghostly new barrier which hadn’t been there the previous day and against which Emma was tossing her baseball. As it sailed through the air back to her, Regina reached out and caught it left-handed.

“Must we have yet another discussion about your ignorance of magic?”

“What’s wrong now?”

“What if you had thrown this and it was repelled back to you at a force which took your arm off?” She dropped the ball back into Emma’s hand.

Emma looked at her, assessing whether she was being serious about that being a possibility, or just irritated by the thumping of ball against barrier and wanting Emma to stop. 

“Worried about me?”

“I merely have no desire to spend the rest of our lives patching you up.”

Which, fuck, Emma hadn’t thought of that. What if they didn’t reverse whatever this was? What if this was their future, the two of them alone in Fake Storybrooke? Suddenly, she felt less sullen but a lot more afraid.

“We’re gonna get home, aren’t we? You’re gonna fix this.” Because that’s what Regina did. Eclipses and curses and magical threats and all the weird shit that they faced: Regina fixed them all.

“I’m trying, and I’m genuinely starting to believe that this is a time-limited spell, but please don’t take unnecessary risks in the meantime.” Regina’s eyes were soft and pleading and all kinds of impossible to say no to. Emma sighed and put the baseball away.

“Sorry.”

“It’s fine. Just try to be a little less, well, you.” Regina’s smile was teasing, immediately lightening the mood.

“Not sure I can do that.”

“I suppose I shouldn’t expect miracles.”

“Funny.” She looked back in the direction they’d come. “We’ve been walking along this thing forever, and I’m still not sure what we’re looking for.”

“A big hole would be a start. I don’t really know what we’re looking for exactly, but I suspect we’ll know it when we see it.” 

“How do you know the spell’s time-limited?”

“Instinct, mostly. It just feels temporary. Things are changing. Yesterday, we couldn’t see this barrier; today, we can. As time goes by, our emotions are getting more heightened, closer to the surface.”

“You think that’s intentional? Maybe someone wants us off-kilter.” Emma was glad that she wasn’t the only one feeling that way. She was not good with her emotions at the best of times, and she felt more and deeper for Regina than anyone else, even more than Henry, because her feelings for him were entirely pure and simple. What she felt for Regina was complex and confusing and gut-wrenching and heartbreaking and all those great things from which she usually ran.

“If I were to guess, I’d say that it’s more likely that the magic in the spell is starting to burn itself out and it’s affecting us.” She glanced over her shoulder at Emma. “I’m more worried about what possible benefit someone might gain from banishing Storybrooke’s two most powerful magic users, even for a short period of time.”

“But then the other magic users are probably still in real Storybrooke, along with all the fairy dust, so it’s not like the town is left undefended.” The last thing they needed was yet another villain in town trying to freeze people or steal souls or turn everyone into flying monkeys.

“That seems a reasonable assumption,” Regina said, “which means it really is about us.”

“Because we can combine our magic?”

“Another reasonable assumption but, without any idea of who cast it or even how it was cast, it’s hard to know one way or the other.”

As she walked ahead on the path, Regina stumbled, her foot catching on some undergrowth, and Emma’s hands instinctively shot out to steady her, grabbing her by the hips. The action brought Regina flush against her, her back melded to Emma’s front.

“You okay?”

“Fine.”

“You sure?” Her mouth was right by Regina’s ear, and she could feel soft hair tickling her cheek.

“Yes. Thank you for catching me.” Regina’s speaking voice always sounded like raw sex to Emma, but right then it had a breathless quality which intensified it. And Emma’s crotch was pressing into Regina’s ass, and her breasts were against Regina’s back, and her heart was pounding like a jackhammer, so she stepped back before her hormones got the better of her and her hands moved from helpful friend to inappropriate touch. 

“No problem.” She was glad that Regina couldn’t see how flushed she was.

“We should keep going.”

“Yeah.”

They started walking in silence, and then Regina’s hand shot out, her arm blocking Emma’s path.

“Do you hear that?” she asked.

Emma cocked her head to one side, trying to figure out what she was supposed to be listening for, but there was nothing but the chirping of insects and the low whine of the barrier. And, okay, that was new. 

“Crickets. I can hear crickets.”

“Exactly.” Regina turned to her. “That, Emma, is a definite ripple in this spell.”

They rushed as best they could, considering they were trudging through deep vegetation and Regina was in high-heeled boots—mountain climbing, my ass, Emma thought—in the direction of the new noise. They finally reached an area where the barrier shimmered in an unusual way.

“Give me your baseball,” Regina said, holding her hand out.

Emma instinctively responded to the command, but stopped with her hand just over Regina’s. “Hold on. How come you get to throw it and I don’t?”

“Because you’re an idiot and I’m not.”

“I’m better at pitching.”

“How could you possibly know that?”

“I was lead pitcher for the softball team in junior high.” She’d had to steal a lot of the equipment she needed, but security was usually just one fixed VHS camera in those days, and she was a good thief—a great thief, even, a natural grifter and lifter—long before she met Neal.

Regina raised an eyebrow and smirked. “But of course you were.”

Emma retracted her hand and folded her arms over her chest because she knew an insult when she heard one. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“That you’re exactly the type for softball.” Regina gestured with her fingers for Emma to hand over the ball. “I can use my magic to guide it to the weakest spot, no natural physical talent required. I’m sure, however, that you were an excellent pitcher. Did you play soccer, too?”

“Yes. Why?”

“No reason. Hand over the ball, Emma.” Regina gestured again.

“No. Tell me what you mean.”

“Have you seen yourself?”

“What’s your point?”

“You’re very,” Regina paused slightly, “sporty.”

“Sporty?”

“Yes.”

“And that’s a euphemism for?”

Regina shrugged. “It’s an observation, not a euphemism. You’re very sporty.” She folded her arms, matching Emma’s stance, looking Emma up and down. “You’re fit, toned, athletic. You obviously work out. As I said, sporty.”

“Uh-huh.” Much as she was pleased that Regina noticed that she kept in shape, she knew she was being played. “Still not what you were really thinking.”

“And your evidence for this, Sheriff?”

“I know when you’re lying to me.”

“The fabled Emma Swan superpower. Tell me, is the the same superpower which didn’t detect that your fiancé was a flying monkey?”

Emma laughed. “Oh, I know I’ve got you on the back foot when you go to the monkey jokes. For the record, I never agreed to marry him, and I still know when you’re lying to me. And not because of any superpower.”

“No?” Regina took a step towards her, deceptively calm and smiling like she had nothing to hide.

“Don’t need a superpower to read you.”

“Is that so?” Regina reached out and closed her hand over the baseball, trying to ease it out of Emma’s grasp.

“Yup.” Emma was quite willing to give up the ball, but she enjoyed the feeling of Regina’s hand over her own, so she tightened her grip.

“How?”

“Because I know you.”

“That’s it?” Regina was still trying to wrest the ball from her hand, narrowing her eyes at Emma’s unwillingness to give it over. “You know me.”

“I know you and you know me. I always know what you’re not saying, just like you always know what I won’t say either.” She could take it further, she thought. She could say a lot more than that. The spell was making her want to admit her late-night secrets, but their truths were getting too close to the surface again, so she let go of the baseball, which caused Regina to stagger back a few steps. 

It took a few moments, each staring at the other, eyes wild, words not required, before Regina found her game face, that knowing smirk which made Emma want to pull her towards her and kiss that look right off her face.

Emma inclined her chin towards the barrier. “Throw the ball, woman. Show me that magic arm you’ve got.”

For a tiny woman wearing heels, who usually dressed like she’d never even seen a sports field, much less graced one with her presence, Regina had a pretty decent wind-up and pitching action. The ball flew straight and clear, Regina’s eyes tracking it, willing it to find the weakest spot. It wasn’t heading for the centre of the shimmering column, but Emma knew it would be the right area because, hell, this was Regina Mills. But the ball didn’t pass through. It stuck right where it landed, half in the Fake Storybrooke side and half on the other side. And Emma realised that she didn’t even know what was on the other side. It might be the real world or it might ‘here be dragons’ or it might be downtown Manhattan, because who the hell knew with magic.

They both walked up to the barrier, examining where the ball sat, high and away from their reach. Electrical currents passed around it like a river bending for a rock. The wilful child in Emma wanted to touch the wall of faint blue light, but she knew that would earn a rebuke from Regina. From the tightness in Regina’s jaw, Emma was betting that she’d expected the ball to sail through, so it probably wasn’t best to push her any further. Except, Emma wasn’t exactly known for doing the sensible thing and the air between them was too thick anyway.

“So, we’ve established that you throw like a little girl,” she said. Regina swung her head around, eyes blazing. Emma kept staring up at the ball, though. “Probably because you’re not as sporty as me.” She raised her arm and patted her bicep through her leather jacket, and she caught the way Regina’s eyes followed the movement. “Wanna feel?”

“Idiot.” Regina shook her head, the tension between them broken again. She stared back up at the baseball. “Right, well, that didn’t work.” 

“You wanna take a break?” Emma suggested. “Get something to eat?”

Regina glanced down at her watch. “We did skip lunch, I suppose.”

“Can you poof us? It’s miles back to the car.”

“If that’s what you want, you do it. You need the magic practice.” 

“You know I’m not great at that one.”

“And you’re never going to master it if you don’t practise.” Regina stepped in front of her and took Emma’s hands. “Now, take us to my house.”

Emma closed her eyes and started to concentrate, then jerked her head up. “Hey, do you think we could—”

“—apparate to the other side of this barrier? Been there, tried that. Doesn’t work.”

“Oh. Right.”

“Now, try to take us to my house, if you actually can.” Regina squeezed their joined hands.

Emma bowed her head and rolled her shoulders to loosen them up. “Fine, but I still think this would be much cooler if you’d teach me how to have the Star Trek transporter noise play in the background when we do this.”

“Your request is noted again.”

“And?”

“Denied again.”


	4. Saturday Afternoon/Night

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to everyone who has commented. And thanks to Nanny for sending me much-needed corrections via Twitter.

They made it to Regina’s house on the first attempt, which Emma felt wasn’t quite as appreciated as it could have been, and she pointed this out several times while Regina chopped and peeled the ingredients for their meal. At first, she wasn’t sure why Regina hadn’t just conjured the whole meal itself, but then she remembered that cooking was Regina’s way of thinking things through; her kitchen was the one place she felt most in control.

She jumped up to sit on the counter beside her, legs dangling against the cupboard below. Regina was humming something to herself, possibly classical, and Emma wondered what it must have been like for Henry to have his mother sing to him as a child. He really had been a lucky child, even if it had taken both of them a long time to appreciate just how lucky. Emma knew from the memories Regina had given her of the complete and unselfish love she had given him as a little boy.

“How come there’s gas but no electricity?” she asked.

“Because this is the spell of an amateur,” Regina replied, her mouth curled in distaste that someone had done a shoddy job with magic.

“Do you not think it’s weird that our homes aren’t like the others?”

“In what way?”

“All our stuff is here and just like we left it, not like everywhere else.”

Regina considered that for a moment, looking around the kitchen, which looked much as it did every other time Emma had been there. “That’s a good point, actually.”

“Thanks. I have my moments.”

“Yes, you do. Not many, but some.” Regina’s eyes flashed with amusement. A quick flick of her wrist made an open bottle of cold beer appear in Emma’s hand, a glass of wine in front of Regina. “Consider that your reward for your recent awe-inspiring show of incredibly basic magic which even a child could have achieved.”

“Aw, shucks. You’re gonna make me blush.” She tipped the bottle to her lips and took a sip. It was so cold that she could hardly taste it, but it felt good running down her throat. She got a better taste the second time, and it was sharp and clean and better than any beer she could remember trying.

“I’d say that the reason our homes are better facsimiles is that we were definitely the intended targets. Because the spell is focused on us, it did a more complete job of creating our normal realities. We should probably visit my office and the Sheriff’s Station to confirm.”

That made sense, Emma supposed. She took another drink of her beer, and then examined the bottle, which had no identifying label of any kind. “What is this anyway?”

“Something that Lucius Adamson makes in his micro-brewery.”

“Storybrooke has a micro-brewery?” Emma swung her legs back and forth, heels kicking against the cupboard door, which earned her a firm glare but not an actual telling-off.

“Lucius was a cooper and a bootlegger back in the Enchanted Forest.” Regina picked up the vegetables she had been chopping and dropped them into a pan of cold water sitting over a burner. “He’s started making handcrafted beers which, by all accounts, are really rather fine.”

“No argument here. This is really good stuff.” Emma raised her bottle to her lips again. “How come I didn’t know about this illegal activity?”

“I have no idea. But it does raise the question of how you managed to get elected Sheriff if you’re so incompetent that you don’t know one of the worst-kept criminal secrets in town.”

“Hey, the people adore me, and, more importantly, I ran unopposed, much like the Mayor.” She nudged Regina’s hip playfully with her knee. “What’s a cooper?”

“A barrel-maker.”

“That probably comes in handy for a bootlegger. How did you find out about him?”

“I asked Ruby to recommend a beer she thought you might like. She suggested speaking to Lucius.”

Emma stifled a grin. Regina had bought beer just for her. Sweet.

“Does the whole town know about this place?”

“I have no idea.” Regina added salt and some spices to the sauce she was making. “I can show you his brewery later, if you like. It’s really just a shed out on the north edge of the forest, but we’ll pass nearby when we’re following the town line.” She dipped a wooden spoon into the pan and then held it up for Emma to taste.

“Mmm. That’s perfect.” In a different life, Regina would have made an excellent chef. Even if she didn’t love her for a million other reasons, Emma could have fallen in love with her cooking alone. “Maybe I can raid him some time and confiscate some of his fine, fine product. For purely official reasons, of course.”

“I’m sure he’d give you some for free if you offered to leave his business alone.”

Emma held her bottle to her chest in mock-horror. “I hope you’re not implying that the Office of the Sheriff can be bribed.”

Regina stopped her meal preparations and stared at her evenly. “Not the Office of the Sheriff, no. Your father is incorruptible. You, on the other hand, could be easily bought for a slice of pie or a cold beer.”

“I’m outraged that you would even suggest such a thing.”

“If I know one thing, Emma, it’s that you and Henry are ruled by your stomachs.” In less than a second, Regina’s face went from playful teasing to sorrow, her eyes closing as she thought of the boy who wasn’t with them. Without thinking twice, Emma put her beer down and slid down from the counter, stepping behind Regina and wrapping her arms around her waist. Regina stiffened, her head bowed.

“It’ll be okay. We’ll be with him soon.” She tightened her hold, resting her chin on Regina’s shoulder and feeling her relax against her. “It’s gonna be okay. You’ll get us back to him, I know.”

Regina snorted, but tilted her head back to rest her temple against Emma’s cheek. “Some Saviour you are, expecting me to do all the work.” Her hands covered Emma’s own, threading their fingers together.

“You’re the brains. I’m just the hired muscle.” Emma closed her eyes and enjoyed the feeling of Regina in her arms. It felt right in a way that nothing else ever had. For once, the overpowering lust which had been simmering inside her all day was not her first thought. All she wanted to do was protect this woman, take every little hurt away. Love her till the end of her days, a tiny voice at the back of her head supplied.

They stood like that for a short while longer, not speaking, merely drawing comfort from each other, until the water in one of the pans bubbled over and Regina tapped Emma’s arms to be let free. When Regina didn’t say anything and remained at the stove, Emma hopped back onto the counter, sad that their moment had not lasted longer. But from the way Regina had moved away hesitantly, Emma knew that she had been as reluctant to break their hold as she was.

She sipped at her beer and watched Regina finish her preparations. She waited until Regina was taking a sip from her wine, stirring the sauce with her other hand, before she spoke again.

“So, like, sporty was just your way of implying that I’m totally gay, right?” She tried not to snigger when Regina nearly choked on her wine, her face turning beet-red before she glared at Emma. “Just asking.”

She didn’t expect Regina to actually reply, but the other woman calmed herself almost immediately and took a fresh sip of wine, this time without the spit-take, and then faced her, arms folded across her chest.

“Yes. Yes, it was. What’s your point?”

And Emma had no reply at all to that, so she ducked her head and sipped her beer, avoiding eye contact until she felt Regina go back to her cooking.

Shit, she was in so far over her head.

+

They transported to the Sheriff’s Station after their late lunch and, as expected, it was more lived-in than the other places they’d been. The report Emma had abandoned half-way through on Thursday evening was sticking out of the printer and the coffee machine needed emptied and cleaned, which was definitely nothing new. Regina wrinkled her nose in displeasure at the untidiness of Emma’s desk, but didn’t make any comment. Their next stop was Regina’s office and it was neat and spotless and, according to Regina, just as she’d left it. All they’d managed to do was confirm their suspicions yet again, so they transported back out to the town line, as it seemed their best hope for a fresh lead.

Things between them seemed fine—well, as fine as they could be for two hyper-emotional people stuck in a town with no other people and no daylight and no noise and a weird glowing barrier. By unspoken agreement, they kept their conversation light, more like their Sunday night talks than the more heated exchanges they’d been having since being stranded together.

Emma’s lust was back full-force, and she regretted that it was early winter and that Regina had changed into more appropriate forest-trekking clothes. The burgundy blouse with its enticingly revealing front had gone in favour of a sweater and a deconstructed military-style jacket-coat thing (clothes not being one of the things Emma knew much about, along with magic, spells and, apparently, women). She was even wearing a pair of no doubt ridiculously expensive hiking boots, and Emma missed the heels and their promise of the occasional stumble into her arms. On the bright side, Regina continued to walk ahead of her and that gave plenty of opportunity to stare at Regina’s ass. And she was at least still wearing Emma’s jeans.

By nine o’clock, they had found nothing new at all, and the high point had been a quick tour of Lucius Adamson’s illegal brewery. To be thorough, they headed back to the small clearing where they’d heard the crickets and launched the baseball. A quick check showed that nothing there had changed. The baseball remained stuck, and the faint chirrup of insects still didn’t extend more than a few hundred yards from the small anomaly in the barrier. Despite much eye rolling from Regina, Emma insisted on conjuring a second baseball. It connected a foot or so below the first with a dull thud and dropped straight to the ground. Regina didn’t have to say ‘I told you so’ for Emma to read it in her badly concealed grin.

They’d already agreed earlier that day to spend their nights at Emma’s house, and it didn’t need said that they both wanted to be there because it was where Henry had been seen last. Regina transported over some clothes, enough for a few days. While she was in the bathroom, getting dressed for bed, Emma stood in her living room, hands on her hips, staring at the couch. There was no way she could take another night there with Regina, not when they had both acknowledged that emotions were running too high as it was, not when all she could think about was the way Regina felt against her earlier and how she wanted that feeling every day for the rest of her life. And, in the silence, in the dark, with no-one else but the two of them, it would be far too easy to give into her stupid fantasies of what could never be.

Love as an adult was nowhere near as easy as it seemed at seventeen. At seventeen, the world was before you, a shining horizon of possibility. At seventeen, Neal had looked like her future, after all. At thirty-something, you knew that life was not fair, that happy endings were often granted to the people who least deserved them, while those who needed them most saw their hopes dashed time and again. The risks were so much higher, because there was nowhere to run—no picking up and taking off in the middle of the night with a sweatshirt and cab fare—when you had a child and a slew of other adult responsibilities. There was no wallowing in loud music in your bedroom when you had a teenage son, mostly because that sort of behaviour was his prerogative. Three-day benders were out of the question when you were the Sheriff and you only got one full day off a week, and had to maintain a public image befitting the job.

And there was Henry himself. No matter what else happened, they would always be Henry’s parents. They would always have to find a way to get along together for him. And they were good at being his parents now. If she ruined her relationship with Regina by overstepping her bounds just because they were stuck in some spell, it wouldn’t be fair to Henry to have his mothers at each other’s throats again.

And then there was the most important thing: Regina Mills deserved a lot better than Emma Swan. Regina deserved someone who would always put her first, who wouldn’t hurt her, who would give her all the happiness in the world. Emma had wasted so many opportunities in Neverland and any number of times before the second curse, and when she first came back from New York. She had been so caught up in her own feelings, in having parents who didn’t love her the way she needed them to, and in Neal and Hook and things that didn’t even matter now. She had thought that Regina would always be there when she was ready for her. Someone who truly deserved to be with Regina would never have treated her like that. Someone who deserved Regina’s love would have done everything and anything to be with her; they certainly wouldn’t have been arrogant enough to think that they were the only one who could see what Regina was, that they were the only one who would want her.

“You look like you’re a million miles away.”

Emma spun around and, damn, Regina in a pair of black silk pyjamas, barefoot, no make-up, hair tousled, and so achingly beautiful, was not the answer to the churning in Emma’s gut.

“Thinking.”

“Don’t hurt yourself.” A lifetime and a few curses ago, that statement would have been dripping with scorn, but Regina was smiling at her almost shyly. Emma shrugged and jammed her hands into the pockets of her jeans before they betrayed her and reached out for the woman before her.

“You want coffee or tea or something before we turn in?” It would be a distraction, give her something to do other than stare and want and stare some more and think about how her hands would feel slipping under that silk and touching Regina.

“Can I trust you with hot water?”

Emma rolled her eyes but didn’t answer. As she headed to her small kitchen area, she saw Regina settling herself on the couch, tucking her legs underneath her and retrieving the book she’d been reading the night before. It wasn’t long before she was taking two mugs of coffee through and Regina looked up, smiling at her so sweetly, and, once again, Emma couldn’t help thinking that this was the way things were supposed to be, them taking care of each other, sharing, being together. She sighed heavily as she sat down.

“I’m sure we’ll figure this all out tomorrow,” Regina said, misinterpreting Emma’s unhappiness as being about the spell and not the foolishness of wanting the impossible.

“Yeah, I know.” And she did. She still had complete faith that Regina could solve their problem. Only, there was a significant part of her that now didn’t want the spell to end so soon because, apart from missing Henry, being with Regina like this was pretty close to perfect. “Do you want me to light some candles?”

Regina shook her head. “Not unless you do.”

For the first time since they had been stranded, Emma turned the conversation to Henry—not how much they missed him, which was a given, but stories from their year in New York. Looking back, Emma had known that their family hadn’t been complete, as had Henry. Without their memories, they hadn’t known what was wrong, but Emma knew now that they had both been missing Regina. That wasn’t what she said out loud, though. She told Regina about science pop quizzes which he aced and their joint frustrations with American history, about getting caught in a rain storm in Central Park which left them both with terrible colds for weeks, and her inept efforts at taking him shopping for clothes because he grew out of things faster than she could buy them. As she spoke, she thought of the innate traits and facial expressions which made Henry unequivocally Regina Mills’ son, even when Regina herself was not around. And even though she’d heard some of them many times before, Regina lapped up every anecdote because she could listen all night to how wonderful her son was.

A second coffee became a third before Emma ran out of steam. They sipped their drinks quietly, the silence and the darkness settling in around them again.

“May I ask you a personal question?” Regina said, and Emma chuckled at the correct use of ‘may’.

“Depends. I thought we were supposed to be avoiding the big emotional stuff.”

“You don’t have to answer.” Regina looked so serious that Emma swallowed, fearing that she really wouldn’t be able to answer whatever it was. “It’s just that I noticed that there don’t seem to be any of Hook’s things in your home, and you’ve hardly mentioned him at all.”

Emma nodded slowly. She’d wondered when Regina might bring up Hook again. “That’s not actually a question.”

“And that’s not actually an answer.” Regina ducked her head to avoid Emma’s eyes as she spoke. “You’ve seemed ill-at-ease recently, and I, I worry about you.”

Her first instinct was to say that there was no need, but she liked the idea of Regina worrying about her, so she decided to tell the truth. “We’re not even together right now. We had a fight about Henry and the drinking. I told him not to come back until he was ready to apologise. I guess he’s not ready to apologise yet.”

“Oh.” Regina glanced sideways at her. And Emma could read the slight hurt that Emma hadn’t once let on that anything was wrong, even though the drinking incident had been nearly two months ago, which did, she supposed, make it look like she was keeping things from Regina.

That wasn’t how she saw it, though. Emma kept her life compartmentalised. There was Emma and Hook, which was one thing, and Emma and Regina and Henry, which was the best thing, and then there was Emma and Regina, which was the scariest thing. They were three very different parts of her life, and they weren’t something which she allowed to overlap very often. She managed her life by making sure they were kept separate.

She sighed. “Even when we are, he’s not, I mean, I don’t—” She exhaled and rubbed her thumb against her coffee cup, the Red Sox one Henry had given her the previous Christmas. “This is Henry’s home, and Hook doesn’t get to stay here. It would be confusing for Henry.”

It had nothing to do with Henry. Hook was never invited to stay because if he came to Emma’s house then Emma couldn’t leave. And Emma never stayed the full night at his, not even in the weeks when Henry was with Regina, because she could never sleep beside him. She looked at him and all she could ever see was the fact that she had tied him to her with promises she could never keep, even if she hadn’t said them out loud. He had taken her commitment as read from the fact that she had never contradicted his assumptions. And, in the dark of the night, the feelings of self-loathing started closing in on her because she was using him as another form of running. As long as she was with Hook, her true feelings were safe and hidden and contained, and that wasn’t fair on either of them.

“For Henry?” Regina obviously was not fooled.

“He’s just a boy. He doesn’t need his life complicated by the men his mothers choose to date.” Emma bit her lip, unable to offer a better lie.

“You’re not dating men plural, Emma. You’ve been with him for over two years,” Regina said. It was true, but it still felt like a low blow, and Emma gave her a look which said as much. Regina shrugged her shoulder. “And it’s not really my business. I apologise. I didn’t mean to pry.”

“No, it’s fine. I, it’s—” She continued to knead the cup with her hands. “We don’t usually talk about this stuff. Well, I don’t. I’m not good at it.”

Regina nodded, then turned more fully towards Emma. “What I was trying to say—ineptly, as it turns out—is that if you ever wanted to talk about things, you could come to me, and I wouldn’t judge you.”

Emma couldn’t keep the incredulity from her voice. “You? Not judge?”

“I said I wouldn’t judge you. I didn’t promise to be as kind about that pirate or your idiot parents.”

They both grunted in laughter at that, because Regina was friends with Snow and David now, and their relationship was complicated, but definitely family.

They slipped back into silence. After only a few moments, Regina shifted her left leg and tucked her foot under Emma’s thigh. Without thinking, Emma’s hand moved to Regina’s shin, feeling her warmth through the silk.

“It never felt completely right with Robin, you know.”

“What?” Emma whipped her head around in shock. Regina put her coffee down and wrung her hands together, grasping her right thumb with her left hand and twisting.

“It was thrilling to be courted, of course. And he was a good man.” She shook her head. “He is a good man, still. And Roland is a wonderful boy. And I have no doubt that, given time, we could have grown to love each other and made a pleasant life for ourselves. But he wasn’t—”

“Daniel?”

“No, he wasn’t like Daniel at all,” Regina agreed. There was still a flash of pain in her eyes and Emma marvelled at how much Regina must have loved Daniel to be affected after five decades and everything which had passed since. “But, that wasn’t what I was going to say. He wasn’t the world to me. I wasn’t in love with him.”

That was even more shocking. “But I thought Robin was your soulmate?”

“It’s not the same as True Love, although it can be. You can be soulmates with someone and never have it develop beyond a very deep friendship.” Regina stared at a fixed point on the back of the couch, and she scraped her fingernails across the grain of the fabric. “I wondered afterwards if the people who were destined for each other were the Robin who never met Marian and the woman I could have become if I had left Leopold. I always felt that I was not the one he saw when he looked at me, that perhaps he carried some idealised vision of who I might be, or might have been.” She shook her head. “It wasn’t ideal, but I wanted to give it a chance, because there were moments when it felt so easy to give into his affection and the closeness, and it had been so long since I, well, since I had felt that someone was interested in me like that. But it always felt like work.” She searched Emma’s face for understanding. “Do you know what I mean?”

Emma nodded. She had the distinct feeling that there was a second question underneath, but she wasn’t entirely sure she knew what it was. She did, however, know what it felt like for her relationship to feel like a constant effort.

“And, this is going to sound self-serving,” Regina said, “but I didn’t sacrifice everything I have held dear over all those years to settle for something which felt merely good, but not great. No matter what, I would never have been able to replace Robin’s wife and he could never have—” She rolled her neck and exhaled. “I would never have fallen in love with him. He would never have been my great love.” She reached her hand out and placed it over Emma’s where it rested on her leg. “It’s part of why I found it so easy to forgive you for what you did.”

“Then why haven’t you dated since?” To be honest, she had somewhat assumed that Regina had been pining for Robin and her lost great love. Also, she was quite shocked to find out that soulmates and fairy dust and all that crap wasn’t quite the destiny that everyone had led her to believe.

“No-one’s asked. Apparently, my reputation still precedes me in this town.”

Emma recognised that as a lie or at least another attempt at the self-deprecation which Regina fell back on far too readily for Emma’s liking. There were others who had asked Regina out. Emma could remember a summer afternoon in Granny’s when she had simmered with rage and jealousy at hearing some guy who came over with the second curse, a former noble from Midas’ kingdom who was friends with Kathryn and Frederick, making plans to ask Regina out to dinner. He was young and good-looking and he’d probably slayed dragons himself, because apparently that wasn’t as big a deal as Emma had thought. And he’d figured he had a chance, said as much to the buddy he was talking to, and all Emma had wanted to do was march up to him and warn him to stay away from her woman. Only, Hook had been sitting next to her, and Regina wasn’t hers, and she had no right to feel that way, so she had forced her pecan pie down and pushed her unhappiness inside.

“You’re thinking again,” Regina said.

Emma looked down at their hands, and then up to Regina’s face. She was so beautiful and unguarded, and there was a reason that they really shouldn’t have started to discuss anything emotional because Emma was almost overwhelmed with how much she felt for Regina, and how increasingly stupid she felt for never telling her about it.

“Why is Kathryn still Kathryn, but Jim is Frederick now?”

Regina laughed at the unexpected change of subject. “They both want to be the best versions of themselves.” She pursed her lips. “Jim was not a happy man, but Frederick loved being a knight, loved Abigail. And Kathryn wasn’t happy as Midas’ daughter. She certainly wasn’t happy at the thought of being with your father in either reality, but Kathryn is a lawyer and a stronger, more independent woman than Abigail. Being Kathryn gives her choices that Abigail would never have had. In many ways, she hated the life of a vacuous princess as much as you would have, if you had grown up in that world.”

They had discussed it often, how Emma was glad that she’d grown up in twentieth-century America and not the Enchanted Forest, because she wouldn’t have been able to cope with being a princess. Regina would tease her occasionally about the marvellous dresses that she would have had to wear, and Emma could only shudder at the thought of what Snow White would have thought appropriate for her daughter. What she always thought, and never admitted, was that the worst part of growing up with her parents would have been the loss of Regina in her life. They would have been true mortal enemies, locked in a war. They would never have had Henry. Emma would never have seen that affectionate smile Regina had when she was indulging Henry—or her, because Regina indulged her, too—and she would never have seen her like this, all late-night softness and pyjamas and kind eyes and quiet warmth.

“I’m not in love with Hook,” she blurted out before she could stop herself.

“I know.”

“You do? How?”

“Because I know you and you know me,” Regina said, repeating Emma’s words from earlier that afternoon. She was tracing lines across the back of Emma’s hand with her fingernails, and Emma knew her hand was trembling, but she tried to breathe evenly. “Because you throw yourself into things without thinking it through. Because you so often do the wrong thing for all the right reasons and then spend far too long trying to fix things, when that’s not always possible. Because sometimes you try so hard to be what you think other people want you to be, instead of who you really are. And, believe me, I know how hard it is to pretend to be something you’re not.”

Emma could feel tears pricking at the back of her eyes, and it was becoming way, way too much, so she withdrew her hand and did what she did best: she ran away.

“I really need to pee. I’ll be right back.” As she bolted from the couch, she saw the frustration on Regina’s face, but couldn’t bring herself to dwell on it.

When she returned, Regina was washing their cups, her bearing stiff and formal, more like the mayor Emma had first met than the woman who was now her closest friend.

“You should take my room tonight,” she said, trying to project a casual demeanour, as if it were no big thing at all. “You didn’t get any sleep last night and this couch isn’t that comfortable.”

Regina turned around, drying her hands with a dishtowel, fixing her with a pointed stare. “You seemed to sleep well enough.”

What could she say? That it was because of the company and not the location? That Regina’s hand on her neck was the single most soothing thing she had ever known?

“Yeah, but you deserve a real bed, and I don’t think there’s much chance that either of us is going to disappear.”

“I suppose not.” Regina bent her head and breathed deeply before folding the towel and placing it carefully on the counter. She seemed disappointed, which confused Emma even more because Regina couldn’t possibly have wanted to spend another night on the couch with her, could she? She probably just wanted human contact because she was unsettled by their isolation and their overly personal conversation. And now Emma felt the need to fix it.

“I could, uh, take the chair in my room, if you’re still worried, though.”

Regina frowned. “You’re not sleeping in a chair, Emma.”

“I’m not bothered about sleeping. I’d feel better if I watched over you anyway.” What was it with her mouth rushing ahead of her brain? She’d made herself sound like some creepy stalker. She cleared her throat. “So, yeah, you go through and I’ll be right there once I’ve finished up here.” She gave what she hoped was a reassuring smile.

“That’s not necessary. I have no doubt that you can watch over me quite successfully from out here.”

“Yeah?”

“Unless you’re suggesting we should share your bed?”

Emma’s eyes widened at that, and her mind filled with possibilities of everything she would like to do to and with Regina Mills if she were in her bed: naked Regina, writhing and mewling beneath her, begging for release as Emma licked her way slowly up her inner thigh, hands exploring slick skin, teeth grazing and drawing soft moans.

“No, that’s not what I—” She stopped as she saw Regina’s grin, and realised she was teasing her. She felt her shoulders relax. “I’ll just get something to wear and then you can get settled in.”

She went through to her bedroom, Regina following close behind. She found the clothes she’d been wearing the previous night and picked them up. Not because they smelled of Regina, but because they were comfortable. Yeah, comfortable. She gathered them to her chest while Regina remained by the door, leaning against the wall, watching her.

“So, bed’s there, obviously.” She inclined her head towards the king-sized bed which dominated the room. She couldn’t look at it without thinking that Regina would be sleeping in her bed, between her sheets, where Emma had wanted her for so long.

“Obviously,” Regina agreed.

“And, yeah.” She shook her head at her own embarrassment. “I’ll set an alarm for six.” She took a few steps forward. “You know where to find me if you need me.” And, seriously, that was the best thing she could think of to say?

“I do.”

“G’night, then.” She ducked her head and tried to move past Regina and escape from the bedroom before she made things even more awkward than she’d already managed to.

“Emma?”

She stopped, barely one foot in the hallway. Damn, not fair. Stupid Kryptonite name thing. She turned around and Regina was biting her lower lip, looking at her from beneath her lashes, and—not fair, not fair, not fair—it was insanely hot.

Regina raised her hand and cupped Emma’s cheek, and she gasped, almost flinching at the unexpected touch. Emma watched, transfixed, as Regina’s tongue flicked out and wet her lips slightly. Her eyes searched Emma’s, and then she moved her head forward slowly, pulling back just before their mouths met.

“Close your eyes,” Regina whispered.

That was the very last thing Emma wanted to do, but she did it anyway, because Regina was asking in that voice she would never resist. She felt a downward pressure on her cheek, so she bowed her head slightly, and then the softest lips were pressing to her skin. Regina kissed each eyelid, then just below, on her cheek, slowly moving across until she kissed the tip of Emma’s nose. She traced lower, moving to Emma’s jaw, and then across to her chin, before kissing at the corners of her lips. And then finally, Regina tipped Emma’s head back and her lips were pressed against Emma’s own.

Of all the ways that Emma had imagined their first kiss, and it was something she thought about most days, even when she was trying not to, she hadn’t ever pictured something so gentle and pure. Passion, she’d figured, would be a given between them. Rage, even, was a distinct possibility, from the way they frequently clashed. Teeth and tongues and writhing and moaning and heat and urgency had all been in there, though.

But Regina’s hand was soft and smooth against her cheek, her fingers resting gently while her thumb stroked along Emma’s jaw, and her lips were barely a whisper against her own. Her kiss was light and tender and adoring. Emma wanted to sink into it and never stop, because being kissed by Regina was a thing of total sensuality. Being kissed by Regina wasn’t just one kiss: it was a thousand tiny kisses, brushes of lip against lip, lingering at times yet never quite enough. Being kissed by Regina was a series of barely audible sighs and a throaty humming noise which vibrated against her mouth and caused her whole body to shudder with need.

And then it was over, Regina pulling back slowly, with a few final feather-light kisses which showed her reluctance to end it. Emma opened her eyes again and saw Regina smiling, her eyes dark and warm.

“Goodnight, Emma.”

“Yeah.”

Regina slipped inside the bedroom and closed the door quietly, leaving Emma standing there, shell-shocked and needy but filled with such hope and longing. She lifted her fingers to her lips and stared at the closed door in front of her.

Fuck.

+

Right across town, unseen and unheard by either of its inhabitants, the baseball fell from its resting place in the barrier, dropping to the other side.


	5. Sunday Morning

Regina was the first to wake that morning, the sounds of the shower running pulling Emma from sleep.

She stretched on the couch, arching her back, trying to work the kinks out from a night spent thinking about that kiss. It was—Emma didn’t really have words. It was something else, more intimate than she would normally be comfortable with. It had felt like things too big for Emma to say. It also, she knew, meant that she would have to speak to Killian when they got back, because she couldn’t possibly go back to him and keep pretending that what they had was anything near enough. She had assumed before that she wasn’t being fair to him, but she accepted now that she was also cheating herself.

When she heard the water shut off and the bathroom door open, she leaned forward as far as possible so she could see down the hallway. Regina was wrapped in a bath towel, another smaller towel in her hand to dry her hair.

“Morning,” Emma said.

Regina looked up, a smile spreading across her face. There was nothing self-conscious in the way she reached up and ran her fingers through her hair. She was preening, putting herself on show. It was a hell of a show. Emma tilted her head and followed the line of Regina’s legs with her eyes, imagining them around her waist, holding her in place, as Regina ground her wet, slick heat across her abdomen.

“I heated the water so we could both have showers.”

“Uh-huh.” Emma wanted to laugh. A hot shower was not what she needed. She finally lifted her eyes to Regina’s face. She was amused and aroused, Emma could tell, so Emma stared back shamelessly, because she felt no shame in appreciating that body.

They maintained eye contact for a few moments longer, then Regina nodded towards Emma’s bedroom.

“I should get dressed.”

“Yeah.”

“What would you like for your breakfast?”

Emma stood, her hands on her hips. “Whatever you want to give me.”

Regina arched an eyebrow, but said nothing else before disappearing into Emma’s room.

Breakfast was mostly silent, each of them staring when they thought the other wasn’t watching, and constantly getting caught. There were soft smiles and eye rolls and the occasional sigh. Once, when Emma reached out for the butter at the same time as Regina, their hands touched for only a moment, and Regina almost pulled hers back, before letting her fingers curl around Emma’s wrist and trailing up the inside of her arm. Neither of them was using words like ‘mistake’ or ‘regret’, which Emma took as a good sign. She didn’t regret a damn thing. If she never kissed another human being for the rest of her life, she could still die happy having been kissed by Regina Mills, and she was finding it very difficult to keep the smile from her face.

“Stop grinning,” Regina finally said, as they walked along the path towards the glitch in the barrier. They had transported directly there because there seemed no point in avoiding using magic, especially since it had been having no ill-effects on them beyond the normal slight tiredness. Regina still thought they shouldn’t get too close, though, because magic was always unpredictable.

“I wasn’t aware that I was smiling but if it bothers you, then I can stop.”

“You’re not as cute as you seem to think you are.”

“On the contrary, I am exactly as cute as I think I am. And I’m also exactly as cute as you think I am.”

“My, aren’t we full of ourselves today?” Regina glanced over her shoulder with a look that Emma categorised as somewhere between amusement and exasperation. She was wearing black pants, which didn’t hug her ass nearly as well as jeans did, but it was still a great view, especially because there was an extra something there. Emma would bet an entire year’s salary that Regina was putting a little more sway and swivel into her hips because she knew Emma was watching.

“Probably. Does that bother you too?”

“Nowhere near as much as it used to.”

This was good, Emma thought. Banter was definitely good. And she was about to respond in kind when she noticed something over Regina’s shoulder which stole the words from her and made her jaw actually fall open in surprise. Regina saw the look and swung around to see what Emma was staring at.

“Oh my God,” Emma said, brushing past Regina in her haste to get to the barrier, her hand instinctively reaching out towards it.

“Emma Swan, don’t you dare touch that.” Regina pulled her back by the shoulder, her fingers digging in through the leather of Emma’s jacket.

They stared, dumbfounded. Where previously the barrier had rippled, there was a large rend, as if someone had sliced it with a knife and pulled back the edges. The baseball was gone. Beyond, there was nothing but total darkness, so much blacker than the half-gloom they had adjusted to in their fake surroundings. The complete emptiness on the other side of the barrier was almost hypnotic.

“Baseball,” Regina said.

“What?” Emma half-turned, but Regina was staring at the barrier, her free hand held out in front of Emma, the other still gripping her shoulder.

“We need another baseball.”

“Oh.” Emma’s eyes fluttered half-shut until the required object appeared in her hand. She dropped it into Regina’s open palm, and was surprised when it was passed back to her.

“You know you’re desperate to try,” Regina said. She looked between Emma and the tear in the barrier. “But perhaps we should take a few steps back.”

“Yeah, that sounds like a plan.” She carefully shuffled backwards, never taking her eyes from the blackness. “Do you sense anything?”

“Like?’

“What’s on the other side?” Emma’s fingers tightened around the ball in her hand.

Regina’s hand fell from her shoulders and she walked closer to the barrier, even as Emma was still backing up.

“Regina,” she warned, fear and anxiety gripping at her.

“It’s okay. I’m not going to do anything stupid.” Regina smirked over her shoulder. “I’m not you.”

Emma let out a nervous laugh, but she still held her breath as she watched Regina peer into the darkness, somehow expecting an arm to shoot out and pull Regina through the gap because she’d watched too many bad horror movies and that was what always happened. But, it didn’t. Regina crinkled her nose and shook her head and then shut her eyes in concentration, but no ghostly hand appeared and nothing changed, although the chirping of crickets seemed louder than ever.

“Nothing,” Regina said, turning away and walking towards Emma.

“Nothing?”

“Actual nothingness.” Regina moved behind her and leaned in, her voice dropping. “Let’s see your best shot, princess.” She made it sound like a sexual challenge, and Emma felt a shiver of anticipation run up her spine.

She shucked off her jacket, handing it over to Regina to hold, and unbuttoned the cuffs of her button-down, rolling the sleeves up over her elbows. She blew onto the baseball and then rotated it in her hand until her fingers settled in the perfect place on either side of its stitching.

“You might want to back up a bit further.”

“Why? No control of your fastball?”

Emma turned to Regina, giving her a slow once-over. “On the contrary. I have perfect control when I need it.” She chuckled to herself as Regina’s eyes darkened. “The barrier, on the other hand, I’m not so sure about.” Without taking a beat, Emma twisted around, planted her foot and snapped her arm back, and then she was there, in the perfect moment where muscle memory knew that the ball needed released. It hurtled towards the gap and, as it passed through, disappeared completely.

They looked at each other, then to the gap, then back to each other.

“Try again?” Emma asked. Regina nodded.

Another baseball delivered the same results, only this time Emma could feel Regina watching her pitch rather than following the ball, and she squared her shoulders in pride and arrogance when she was done. They probably should be flirting less and concentrating harder on the situation, but Emma didn’t care. She folded her arms over her chest and cocked her head to the side.

“Do you want to watch me do that again?”

Regina raised her eyebrow in challenge. “No, I think I’ve seen enough.” Her eyes trailed over Emma’s folded arms and then up to her face, daring Emma to say something else about her stark appraisal. Regina held out her hand and a shiny red apple appeared, its colour matching perfectly with Regina’s lipstick, which, naturally, made Emma stare at that mouth, and think back on how it had felt pressed to hers. Damn, Regina played to win, and Emma was well and truly—and happily—losing this game.

“Nice.” She nodded in appreciation, both of the apple and the entirely intentional effect it had. “Very nice.”

“Thank you.” Regina walked closer to the barrier and stopped about a yard away. She tossed the apple through with a slow underarm lob. “I don’t think there is another side, in any real sense.”

Emma strolled over to join her, her hands in her back pockets. “Meaning what, exactly?” As she reached her, Regina handed her jacket back. Rather than put it on, Emma slung it over her shoulder.

“We’re in an alternate reality, suspended in nothingness. Everything in here is completely contained. Nothing can go beyond it. Anything which does, or tries to, will simply disappear from this reality.”

Emma reached out again, stopping because she could feel Regina’s disapproving glare without needing to see it. “But it’s going somewhere?”

Regina shook her head. “I don’t know. I don’t think trying it with your hand is the way to find out, though.”

“Maybe in real Storybrooke, there’s a couple of baseballs and an apple in the forest, just beyond the town line.”

“Possibly.”

“Which means we might be able to walk through this gap and be home.”

“Or we might end up back in the Enchanted Forest. Or, worse, we could be disintegrated completely.” Regina folded her arms over her chest and peered through the gap, as if she might see an apple and a couple of baseballs floating in space.

“Not good.” Emma stuffed her hand back in her pocket to remove the continuing temptation to touch the barrier.

“No, not good.”

Emma stared at the darkness, not knowing what she was looking for, but finally realising that the chirping she had assumed to be crickets was actually the noise of the barrier itself. And that was disconcerting, because now she was thinking of electric fences and millions of volts passing through her arm. Following Regina’s lead, she conjured a third baseball and tossed it gently. For a second or so, while it remained visible, there was a faint scraping, crackling sound as if it was sliding down the barrier, and then, as Regina had said, nothing.

“I wonder what’s caused the big hole.”

“Time passing. The spell starting to unravel. It could be anything.”

Emma inhaled and exhaled deeply. “You don’t think maybe it was us?” Our kiss, she wanted to say. From Regina’s sad and frustrated look in reply, Emma knew she’d heard the real question.

“I hardly think that—”

“No, don’t.” Emma didn’t want to hear Regina rule out the possibility. She was in love with Regina, and she really didn’t want to be told that her love wasn’t enough, because she knew that good and well already. Her love had never been enough for anyone or anything, but she damn well wanted it to be. “I think it’s entirely possible.”

Regina only let the smile reach her eyes for a moment, before she shook her head again. “Emma, you know—”

“No.” She wasn’t going to be talked down. “We should try again.” She stepped forward, reaching out and wrapping her fingers around Regina’s forearm. She pulled Regina towards her, her face softening and her voice dropping as she looked at Regina’s lips. “I mean, it’s worth a try, right?” Regina’s face said no, but her body was arching in towards Emma’s, so Emma put her other arm around Regina’s waist, her hand flat against the small of her back and pulled her tight against her. “It’s in all the fairytales, or so I’m told.”

“We can’t—”

Emma ducked her head and pressed her mouth against Regina’s. Unlike Regina, she was neither soft nor gentle, but harsh and desperate, because that was how she was feeling. The kiss they’d shared the night before had been entirely about tenderness, but Emma didn’t really give a fuck about True Love or soulmates or any of that crap her parents believed in, because she was not of their world. Oh, she wanted all of that for Regina because, despite her façade, Regina did believe in those things; in Emma’s world, though, dreams didn’t come true, and fairies didn’t promise you happy endings, but sometimes you could get what you wanted, if you worked hard at it and were willing to do whatever it took to get there. And she wanted this. She wanted Regina in a way she couldn’t even explain to herself, like a thirst she would never fully slake.

So she kissed her like that was their only truth, her mouth moving aggressively and her fingers digging into Regina’s back, possessive and wanting. Whatever they were becoming, she was damned if it was going to be taken away from her without a fight. She forced her knee between Regina’s and swallowed the gasp her actions produced, growling at the back of her throat as Regina’s hands wound around her neck, pushing her jacket away and then fisting in her hair as she kissed her back with just as much ferocity.

This was what Emma had imagined they would be together: primal and fierce and Regina’s teeth biting on her bottom lip and her hands scrabbling to get inside Regina’s clothes to feel skin and friction as they moved together and so much need. They were made to fight, against each other and with each other and beside each other and, most importantly, for each other.

She half-opened her eye, looking for a tree or somewhere she could back Regina up, because she was starting to feel like she might keel over, and, moreover, she really wanted to feel Regina harder and tighter against her, and their footing wasn’t great for that. But the nearest tree was twenty feet away. She wished that they weren’t in the middle of the forest, next to the stupid barrier in stupid fake Storybrooke, and then Regina did something with her tongue that erased every conscious thought, and suddenly Emma’s stomach was turning in a way which could mean only one thing, but she couldn’t stop kissing her because it was too good, too perfect. When she allowed herself to pull back, her breath coming shakily in harsh bursts, her chest heaving against Regina’s, she tried to focus.

They were no longer in the forest, but in the middle of her living room, only a few feet from the couch. Before she could even question it, Regina laughed, her hands moving from Emma’s hair to her hips.

“Oh, Emma, Emma, Emma.” She shook her head, grinning.

“What?” She looked around. “I didn’t do this.” Even as she said it, she wasn’t sure that was true.

“No, of course you didn’t.” Regina leaned in, burying her face in Emma’s neck. She kissed and nipped at the skin just below Emma’s ear, as she manoeuvred them in the direction of the couch, getting rid of her own coat on the way, letting it fall to the floor.

“I didn’t.” It was a weak protest which came out as little more than a moan, because Regina’s teeth and tongue were distracting her, and she was trying not to stumble at being shuffled backwards.

“Uh-huh.” Regina placed her hands on Emma’s shoulders and pushed. Emma fell down onto the couch, and Regina clambered after her, her knees straddling Emma’s thighs.

“I di—”

Regina’s hands dropped to the hem of her black v-necked sweater and pulled it over her head, and Emma definitely couldn’t speak, not when there were hands in her hair, pulling her forwards for another kiss. And this time Regina was hard and demanding and, God, how did she even know to kiss like that, because it was incredible. Emma’s hands moved to Regina’s back, exploring the skin and tracing patterns and moving inexorably towards Regina’s sides, fingertips following the line of the black-and-grey lace bra. She’d only been toying with the movement for a few seconds when Regina reached around to grab her wrist, and then placed her hand over Emma’s, guiding it around and—fuck, seriously, this was really happening and not some late-night masturbatory fantasy—pushed Emma’s hand hard against her breast, feeling the nipple against her palm through the lace.

She might not always be the smartest, but Emma could take a hint, so she brought her other hand around and tried to keep kissing Regina as she held both breasts in her palms, kneading and rubbing. Regina’s hands had moved to the couch, either side of Emma’s head, and she was rocking into Emma’s hips. Then, as Emma brushed her thumbs over Regina’s nipples, Regina broke their kiss, throwing her head back and moaning. Despite the fact that she missed the kissing, Emma couldn’t complain because now she could see what her hands were feeling. She could look and see her hands on Regina’s breasts, and see the pleasure flitting across Regina’s face as she touched her.

If all of this was just because of the spell and it never happened again, she would always have this mental image to fall back on, of this beautiful woman in her lap, eyes half shut, tongue wetting her lips as she mewled with pleasure at Emma’s touch. And she wanted to savour every moment of this, and not rush. With that realisation, she let her head fall forward, her forehead resting just below Regina’s neck, and she tried to even out her own breathing, hoping to pull the need within her under control.

“Are you okay?” Regina asked, sensing the change in the atmosphere between them.

“I, this, I don’t want it to be, you know, like—” She stumbled. “I’m not good with words,” she admitted.

“Do you want to stop?” Regina’s voice was concerned, and her hands moved to the back of Emma’s head, one cradling her skull and the other finding her neck, fingers tracing along her hairline. It had never been a particularly sensitive area for Emma before, but it was Regina’s now, and Emma wanted nothing more than to feel Regina’s hands there every day, because that touch felt like she was special and loved and home.

“No. God, no. Never. No. I just want, I don’t know.” How could she say out loud that she’d done a lot of fucking in her life, but now she found that she wanted to make love? How could she say that when, not ten minutes ago, Regina had been trying to deny that their kiss had been about love?

She inhaled the scent of Regina’s skin, turning her head to place her cheek against her sternum, aware that she was sending mixed signals by voicing her hesitancy while her hands were still on Regina’s breasts.

“Emma, what do you want?” There was no judgement in the question, and Regina’s hands were still moving comfortingly against her scalp.

“Everything.” She groaned at her own inarticulacy, pressing a kiss to Regina’s skin. “Just, yeah, everything.” She pulled back enough to be able to see Regina’s face, try to read her eyes. “What do you want?”

“You. Only you.”

Maybe Emma had been wrong before, about what Regina had been trying to say in the forest, because her eyes looked like love and acceptance and tenderness, and that was pretty overwhelming. She didn’t know if it was the spell or five years of pent-up emotions pulling at her heart, but she felt an extreme tightness in her chest and her breath became ragged.

She smiled, reassuring and easy and full of all the wants she had in that moment, and she giggled a little at the matching grin which appeared on Regina’s face. She dropped her head back down, her mouth finding the valley between Regina’s breasts and she kissed her, soft and open-mouthed, her tongue flicking out to taste the sweet-salty skin. She moaned a little, because she had wanted this for so long, and it was hard to be good and soft and slow, but she needed to map out every pore in case she never had a second chance. She let her mouth move over every bit of exposed skin she could find, testing what combination of lips and teeth and tongue caused Regina to sigh or gasp or tighten the grip on the back of Emma’s neck. She kissed and nuzzled and licked and sucked and nipped for long minutes, her hands moving constantly over soft lace, the pattern scratching lightly against her palms.

“God, I love your tits.” She winced a little, because she hadn’t actually meant to say it out loud. It was hardly the world’s most romantic declaration, but it was as true as anything she could say at that moment, and she looked up at Regina to check she hadn’t offended her.

“You think somehow I don’t know?” Regina looked back down with sheer fondness, not the emotion Emma might have expected given their positions, but the perfect one all the same. “You think I don’t see you staring?”

“You noticed, huh?” Emma grinned, her mouth still moving against the soft flesh of Regina’s breasts, unable to stop with open-mouthed kisses now that she was being given the chance, her hands kneading and pressing and touching, wanting every sensation all at once.

“You are not subtle at all.” Regina’s fingers stroked the back of her neck. “Do you even know how impractical thin silk is in November? In Maine, of all places?

“You wear those for me?” She knitted her brows together because that was impossible. She would have noticed that.

Regina laughed at her obvious confusion. “Oh, Emma. I wear them for that look you get.” She arched her back, wordlessly urging Emma’s mouth to keep moving, and gave a breathy little sigh. Fuck, that was the best noise yet. Emma needed to work out how to get her to make that noise again.

“What look?” She moved her mouth along the lace edge of Regina’s bra.

“That look you get of lust and possession and the utter self-confidence of believing that it’s your God-given right to stare.”

“Mmm?” The lust she knew about, but the rest of it? Did she really look like that?

“You could conquer worlds with that look.”

Emma let her eyes flick upwards again, and Regina was moving, her hips undulating, her bottom lip between her teeth. Beautiful, she was so beautiful. And screw being slow and soft. She dipped her head and captured Regina’s nipple between her teeth, soothing it with her tongue over lace, licking and suckling and running circles around it, memorising the sounds and the movements and the feeling.

“Em-ma.” It was raw, and Regina’s hands were gripping at the back of her neck, nails digging in to urge her closer, closer still, wordlessly asking for more. And Emma was happy to oblige.

She moved to the other breast, her hand moving constantly over its twin, feeling the lace wet where her mouth had been. With her free hand, she reached around Regina’s waist, her fingers trying to find their way to the small of Regina’s back to pull her closer still, but Regina’s pants were in her way. She wished more than anything that she could feel nothing but skin. And, with that thought, it was as if they simply melted away and her fingers were pressed into cool skin, as she heard a chuckle above her.

“And I suppose you didn’t do that, either?”

It took a few seconds for her to comprehend both the words and what she was currently feeling, and she reluctantly pulled her mouth from Regina’s nipple, looking down to see smooth thighs draped over her lap. And, fuck, that scrap of matching lace she was wearing was barely able to be called underwear, but it was the sexiest thing Emma had ever seen. She dropped her hand from Regina’s breast to let her fingertips trace over the olive skin of her thighs in wonder.

“I didn’t. Not consciously.” She gave Regina a bashful smile. “I guess I just kinda wished for it and it happened.”

Then she was really confused, when Regina’s smile fell away and she sat up straighter in Emma’s lap, pulling her body out of reach of Emma’s mouth, and her hands from Emma’s head, and why the hell would she do that? Why would she even think about doing that, when the skin and the neck thing and the touching and the everything?

“A wish spell.” Regina shook her head. “I can’t believe I didn’t think of that. I mean, it’s really the most obvious thing and it should have occurred to me that it’s exactly—”

“Uh, Regina.”

“—what must have caused this. I suppose that Blue or one of those other meddling fairies could have achieved such a thing, although it could have been something that someone—”

“Regina.” Emma looked at the other woman, but she was lost in her thoughts, her lip bitten in concentration and not wanton lust or anything else good.

“—brought with them from the other realm. Of course, this makes matters much, much more compli—”

“Gina!” That stopped her.

“What?” Her eyes flashed with irritation and she placed her hands on her hips. Emma couldn’t help but appreciate the visual of that, which caused her to take a couple of seconds to answer.

“Not that I’m not interested,” she shook her head from side-to-side, “although, actually, I’m honestly not right now, but you’re sitting in my lap wearing nothing but some really hot underwear and fuck-me boots and, you know—” Her words were cut off by Regina placing two fingers against her lips and her first thought was what might happen if she were to suck those fingers into her mouth, but Regina’s eyes were dark, darker than Emma had ever seen them, so maybe not her best plan.

“What did you just call me?”

That voice wasn’t Regina. That voice was totally the Evil Queen and several levels of hot more than Emma’s barely functioning brain could cope with.

“Gina?” She said it tentatively, because that was a name she used only in her head, something she silently thought when her fantasies had that dark head between her legs, licking her in just the right way. In her imagination, she moaned it repeatedly. Loudly, lustily.

Regina removed the fingers from Emma’s lips and placed her hand on the swell of her breast, smoothing her palm over it, until she was cupping it underneath. At first Emma couldn’t really decide where to focus, on the hand or on Regina’s face, because the lust in those eyes and that incredibly sexy grin she had were something else. And then Regina grasped her own nipple between her thumb and forefinger and rolled it teasingly and there wasn’t a chance in holy hell that Emma was taking her eyes from that sight. Thankfully, Regina’s other hand was back on her neck, easing her head forward, and Emma’s whole body was tight and taut, because Regina Mills was playing with her own nipple, right in front of her.

And, no, she wasn’t, was she? Fuck, yes, Regina was actually pulling Emma’s head towards her breast. Fuck, fuck, fuck, so fucking hot.

“Don’t ever call me that again. Say my actual name.”

She would have answered more quickly if she hadn’t been completely taken with Regina fingering her nipple right in front of her face, almost close enough for her tongue to be able to reach out and join in.

“Regina,” she whispered before saying it again more confidently. “Regina.” Then there was a noise which was even better than the breathy little moan Regina had made before. This noise was deep and guttural and Emma didn’t want to hear anything else ever again. It rained down on her as Regina thrust her breast into Emma’s mouth. And Emma’s brain might very well have shorted completely on the sensations of Regina’s nipple between her teeth and Regina’s fingers against her tongue, and she was licking and sucking and flicking even as Regina was pinching and rolling.

She dropped her hands back to Regina’s thighs, stroking and pressing into the flesh. She loved the way Regina’s muscles tensed under her touch, the slight trembling against her fingertips as they scraped backwards and forwards. This was way better than anything she had ever wished for, she thought as she felt Regina’s fingers angle her head better against her breast.

“Whoa. Hey.” She pulled back, Regina’s nipple falling from her mouth.

“What?” Regina’s lips were drawn in a pout, which was both sexy and adorable, especially as she was trying to thrust herself back towards Emma’s hands and mouth.

“Is this, I mean—” Emma shook her head. She really didn’t want to ask, in case the answer was not the right one, but she also didn’t want to have only semi-consensual sex with the woman she actually loved. She breathed deeply, her fingers still moving against Regina’s thighs and, Jesus, they were incredible, so smooth and supple.

“Emma.”

“Oh, yeah. Sorry.” She shook her head. “I just wondered if maybe, well, this was, uh, something to do with the spell, because I’d wished for it so hard, so many times, and maybe not really to do with, well, you and me. And I really, you know, want this to be your choice and not something you feel you have to do because of magic or shit.”

“Magic or shit? Very eloquent.” Regina chuckled.

“You know what I mean.” She felt sheepish, embarrassed that she’d broken off from blistering hot sexual activity to talk about feelings and stuff.

“I do.” Regina settled back again, her hands moving to the front of Emma’s shirt, unbuttoning it slowly. “And I appreciate your asking.” She pushed the shirt open and Emma helped out by sitting up enough for it to be pushed off her shoulders. “But thinking is hardly your forte.” Her hands grabbed the bottom of Emma’s tank top and pulled it over her head, dropping it to the floor beside them. “Nice, by the way.”

Emma had worn her best underwear, the only decent matching set she owned. “Thanks.”

“If you had been paying attention earlier, Emma—”

And, really, using the name thing was so unfair. Oh, Christ, and now Regina was removing her own bra, and Emma was going to lose the ability to think entirely if this continued.

“—you’d have realised that this is something I have wanted for quite some time, and nothing to do with some wish of yours.”

Emma just nodded as Regina’s hands found her head again, pulling her closer, this time to actual, naked skin. She let out a moan of lust and contentment as she nuzzled her cheek against Regina’s breast. She felt Regina’s head dip until her mouth was pressed to Emma’s ear, hot breath tickling the fine hairs and making her shiver.

“Now, I wish to feel you inside me,” Regina said. “Do you think you could make that come true?”

In a New York fucking minute.


	6. Sunday Afternoon

In four attempts to get to the bedroom, they had so far made it to the hallway. The first time, Regina had stood up and extended her hand to Emma, but Emma had just pulled her down onto the couch again. The second time, Emma had swung by the kitchen to get some water and Regina had tackled her against the fridge and forced her up onto the kitchen island. The third time was really a continuation of the second, caused mostly by Regina making a surprisingly risqué joke about having eaten Emma out in the kitchen. And the fourth time was pretty much because Regina was naked and the thirty extra feet to get through the bedroom door and onto the bed seemed like too much wasted time when the hardwood floor was just fine by Emma and she was willing to be the one risking splinters in her backside.

“This really isn’t comfortable,” Regina said, although she made no effort to move from her position splayed across Emma.

“I’m the one on the floor. At least you have me as a mattress.” Emma turned her head and pressed a kiss to Regina’s temple, feeling Regina nuzzle her neck in reply.

“Also, we should probably be back out there, looking for clues.”

Yeah, they probably should, but naked Regina lying on top of her versus any other situation in the world was not even a close call. Her hand was resting on Regina Mills’ ass. On her naked ass. And that was Regina Mills’ hand—her actual real-life hand—possessively cupping Emma’s breast. And they’d had sex, like, five times already. Maybe six, but did you count it as one or two if you both came together? And, shit, what was the question again?

“Hmmm.” She hoped that was non-specific enough to be taken as an answer to whatever Regina had said.

“At the very least, we should be trying to work out who would wish you gone.”

“Uh-huh.” Emma wrapped her free arm around Regina’s waist. Maybe a quick nap first to regain her strength. It had been several years since she’d had this much sex in such a short period of time and she’d hardly slept the previous night for thinking about their kiss, and surely Regina wouldn’t object if she just shut her eyes for ten or fifteen minutes? Sleeping on the floor wouldn’t be so bad. It was hardly the first time she’d done it, and Regina made an excellent blanket, all soft and warm and naked.

“You’re not really listening to me, are you?”

“I’m listening. Clues, suspects.” She grunted. “Miss Scarlett in the library with the lead pipe.”

“This is not some kind of game.”

Regina slid off her a little and propped herself up on her elbow, but Emma noted that the hand on her breast didn’t move. She looked at her and, Jesus, Regina was even more beautiful than usual, all mussed and tousled and sated. And Emma had done that. Emma had made her come, screaming her name and swearing like a longshoreman. And, hell if that wasn’t the proudest moment of her life to date because Emma Swan didn’t get to be with a woman like Regina Mills, who was so far out of her league that it was ridiculous.

“You are so fucking gorgeous.”

Regina blushed. “Yes, well, we should still think about going back out on patrol.”

“I guess.” She shut her eyes, still contemplating a quick nap.

“Emma! No sleeping.”

“Not sleeping.” She wrapped both arms around Regina’s waist and pulled her back on top of her. “Just resting.” She shifted Regina until their bodies were aligned perfectly again, although so far they hadn’t found a position which wasn’t amazing in some way.

“The sooner we go, the sooner we can come home again.”

Emma opened one eye. That sounded suspiciously like a bribe. Regina was moving against her, rising onto outstretched arms placed either side of Emma’s head, and her lips were forming an easy grin which Emma was fast associating with the promise of exquisite pleasure to follow. As she moved over her, Regina’s nipples slid across Emma’s cooling skin, which distracted her from the whole ‘this is some kind of trick’ thing. And then Regina’s mouth settled over hers, and she moaned loudly because she could taste herself on Regina’s lips and tongue. Fuck, that was so hot. Regina kissing her was hot enough, but she could taste both of them in that kiss, Regina on her lips and herself on Regina’s, and just, fuck. Regina’s teeth were playing with her bottom lip while their bodies were starting to move against each other again, a slow, languid pressure.

And then it all stopped abruptly as Regina pushed herself off Emma and up into a standing position. Emma scowled.

“Hey, come back here. I was enjoying that.”

“Think of it as an incentive to patrol quickly.” Regina was moving around the room, retrieving articles of clothing. Emma sat up, hugging her knees to her chest and just watched. Regina moved without even a hint of self-consciousness and she was magnificent.

“You think we should check out the barrier again, see if we’ve pushed it open some more?”

Regina turned, her eyes narrowing, a fleeting moment of sadness passing across her face. “It won’t have.”

Emma sighed. “It might.” She dropped her chin to rest on her knees. She thought that they loved each other, but maybe she was the only one who was in love. “I wish it could.”

Regina paused in her dressing and moved to stand next to her, her hand cupping Emma’s cheek.

“Oh, Emma. You can’t make a wish to change the basic laws of magic.”

“No?”

Regina dropped to one knee in front of her, pulling Emma’s face upwards. And it wasn’t fair that she looked so good wearing nothing more than her underwear and a cashmere sweater. Regina was a goddess, whether clothed or not, but Emma just felt exposed and unworthy in her naked state.

“A kiss can only break a curse and, even then, only if it’s written into the curse. It cannot break a wish spell. And you cannot wish for a wish spell to be broken. That would somewhat defeat the point of casting it, after all.”

“Oh.”

“Believe me, if anyone’s kiss could break a spell, it would be yours.” Regina stroked her knuckles across Emma’s cheek.

Well, maybe that wasn’t so bad. It was definitely better than being told that her love wasn’t enough. Emma really hoped that, after everything was over, they would be able to keep what they’d found together, because she was already addicted to the soft, tender looks Regina had been giving her, and she didn’t think she could go back to not having that every day of her life.

“So how do we break a wish spell?”

“We don’t. It ends when it’s supposed to end, according to time limits set by the caster.”

“What happened to all spells have a thread and we just need to find it and pull it? Isn’t that what you told me the other day?”

“That was when I assumed that it was a simple spell. This is something altogether different.”

“So why the hell are we even wasting our time going out at all, if we can’t do anything to change the spell?” Emma shrugged, knowing she sounded like a petulant teen, but all she really wanted to do was spend the rest of their time in Fake Storybrooke in bed with Regina, assuming they ever made it to a bed at some point.

“Because we’re much more likely to find out who cast this here than at home, when there are no traces of the spell left.” She pressed a chaste kiss to Emma’s forehead. “Come on, get dressed and we’ll be back before you even know it.”

“Don’t want to.”

Regina stood up and twirled her fingers, immediately causing Emma to be dressed. Although most of her clothes were from earlier, she was wearing a charcoal sweater she’d never seen before, but which fitted her perfectly.

At Emma’s confused frown, Regina said, “I was going to give it to you for Christmas. But we can’t have you freezing to death out there, can we?” She held her hand out to help Emma from the floor.

Man, she really hadn’t done anything remotely good enough in her life to deserve everything that Regina gave her. She allowed Regina to help her up, and she used their linked hands to pull the other woman into a hug, burying her face in Regina’s neck. She then remembered that Regina was only partially dressed, so dropped her hands to cup her ass.

“Emma.”

“What? My hand slipped.”

“Both your hands?” Regina was smiling against her neck and not pulling back, so she obviously didn’t mind that much.

“They have a mind of their own.” Emma gave another squeeze, just because she could, and that earned her a very half-hearted slap on the shoulder.

+

The barrier looked exactly as it had been before their extended break. The rip hadn’t got any larger. Both of them went as close as they dared, but agreed that there was nothing to see. The noise, however, was appreciably louder, now much more like an electrified fence rather than the buzzing of insects.

“Time is definitely running out,” Regina said.

“How can you be so sure?” Emma reached out and wrapped her arm around Regina’s waist, pulling her back into her. She figured she should try extra hard to keep her hands to herself, but Regina just being Regina made the desire to touch overwhelming, so she decided not to restrain herself.

“The noise.” Regina leaned back against Emma. “We should go into town. I don’t think there’s anything more to be learned out here.”

“Where should we go? It’s not like we know anything more than we did before, and we’ve not found anything at all so far.”

Regina paused for a fraction too long before saying, “There are places we haven’t tried yet.”

“You know something.” Emma tightened her hold, so that Regina couldn’t pull away, literally or figuratively.

“No.” This time, the answer came too quickly.

“Tell me.”

Regina drew her finger over Emma’s forearm until she reached Emma’s hand, tugging it into her own. Their fingers entwined naturally.

“We should try the B&B.”

“The B&B? You think Granny or Ruby had something to do with this?” Emma squeezed her fingers around Regina’s. How could holding someone’s hand feel so good, so perfectly right?

“Not them.” Regina’s body tightened, as if bracing herself.

“But then, who do you—” Emma ground to a halt, as she realised that the B&B had only one long-term resident.

She let her head drop to Regina’s shoulder and exhaled slowly. The hot sting behind her eyes was not a good sign. And she really hated crying. She hated crying more than anything in the world, because tough kids who didn’t need anyone or anything except themselves—and Henry and Regina, her mind added—didn’t show their emotions by crying. Crying was for the weak kids, the ones who got picked on and teased and had their heads flushed down the toilet bowl. Crying was for the kids who wouldn’t make it out of the system in one piece.

“Killian,” she said, not really needing it confirmed, because Regina’s body language was telling her everything she needed to know.

“It’s a possibility, yes.” Regina ran her fingers over the back of Emma’s hand, another gesture to which she was becoming far too attached. “I considered Gold, of course, but his shop has no resonance. The complete lack of fairy dust also excluded Reul Ghorm or any of her little acolytes. And, well, your parents wouldn’t wish you away, so that rules them out.” She sighed. “I even considered Henry, because he’s been pushing things recently, but I really don’t believe he would do anything this foolish. So, yes, that leaves Jones.”

Emma’s mind reeled with too many possibilities at once, so many questions which she wanted to ask. She repeated her constant mantra, the one which had saved her ass so many times from bad situations: think. Deep breaths. Think. Concentrate on the important things. Work out what needs handled first. Killian. Henry. Killian. Henry.

“What’s Henry been pushing?”

Regina gave a mildly amused snort. “He thinks you and I have issues which need sorting out.”

Despite herself, Emma chuckled. Yeah, that was their boy. And he would do something like this, no matter what Regina thought. He had a lot more of Emma in him than Regina liked to admit.

“I thought we were getting along well. I mean, even before all this.” An image of Regina riding Emma’s fingers, her own nails digging hard into Emma’s shoulders, flitted through her mind. Fuck, she wanted her again already.

“Yes, well, I suppose we were.” Regina’s reluctance to admit that they had even been friends almost made Emma laugh. “Henry could sense my resentment.”

“Of me?”

Regina pulled herself from Emma’s hold and turned to face her. “I genuinely do not know how you manage to keep your job as Sheriff if you’re this dense. Of that pirate, Emma. Of Jones.”

And, okay, maybe she wasn’t the fastest sometimes, but she was smart and she got people, was good at knowing what made them tick, and she resented the hell out of any insinuation that she wasn’t good at that part of her job. The hurt and irritation on Regina’s face gave her away.

“You were jealous.”

“Well, of course I was jealous.” Regina shook her head, as if that were the most obvious thing. “He had you, and he couldn’t possibly deserve you in a million years. He doesn’t even appreciate what he has in you. He treats you as if you’re some treasure he’s plundered, another fancy bauble to show off. And you let him. Not only do you let him, you let him touch you.” Regina pressed her fingers against her temple. “And I shouldn’t have said that. It is not my place, and I apologise. This spell is—”

“Don’t fuck with me, Regina. This spell is not the problem.” Emma folded her arms across her chest, her own anger and frustration building. “You’re jealous, fine. Better than fine—good, even. It means you care about me. And I want that. You know I care about you, too.” Not care: love. So in love. So in love and too scared to say it because, what if it was only the spell? Attraction and sex and all of that were one thing, but love was a whole ’nother ball game. Love was family and living together and maybe even marriage one day, although Emma would be fine without it, as long as she could have Regina and Henry and home. Love was being brave and facing the world and saying, ‘This is what I want. This family is who I am.’ Love was the fear growing in her chest that one wrong move, one wrong word, and this morning would be taken away from her.

“He came to see me on Thursday.” It was low and Regina’s lip was curled up in distaste. “He asked me to stop seeing you. He informed me that I was interfering in his private life by filling your head with notions.”

“Notions?”

“Apparently, I encourage you to believe that you can do better than him. Which was entirely unfair, as I have made a point of never doing such a thing. I may not have liked him, but I respected your choice to be with him, and I would never have come between you like that.” She smirked. “Well, not intentionally. Certainly not verbally.”

“And what did you tell him?” Calm. Stay calm.

“I hadn’t intended to say anything, because he hardly deserved any acknowledgement of his baseless accusations, but he implied that I was preventing him from having his rightful place in Henry’s life, too.” Regina had been gesticulating with her hands as she spoke, but mention of Henry caused her to close her hand in a fist. “And that man is nothing more than a stranger to my son. He has no place in his life.”

“I know that. I have told him that many times.” Fuck, Killian. And fuck Killian. Emma was disgusted that he would say such a thing, after she had warned him and warned him that Henry was not part of their arrangement. Emma-Hook and Regina-Emma-Henry: two different things. “Henry had a father, even if only for a short time, and Neal doesn’t need replaced, not when the kid has all the parents he’ll ever need in you and me.”

“It never once occurred to me that you might agree with him on that point.” Regina’s voice was sharp. “But he pushed me, and I do not like being pushed, Emma.”

“What did you say to him?” Emma was getting angrier by the second, and she wasn’t sure at whom: Hook, for speaking to Regina in the first place, or Regina, for not telling her about their confrontation.

“That I had nothing to do with his own inadequacies as both a man and a father figure. That the last child he’d been trusted with was Henry’s actual father, whose family he destroyed and whom he abandoned to Pan. That he was unworthy of a place in your life or our son’s. That he was a craven, snivelling, pathetic excuse for a man. That I hardly needed to so much as lift a finger against him for you to see that for yourself.”

Emma groaned. “Awesome.”

“What would you have had me do? Should I have acquiesced to the wishes of a man who sold me to be tortured and killed?”

“He what?”

“Owen Flynn, Emma. He handed me over to Owen Flynn, watched as I was strapped down, and he left me to die.”

And, shit. That day, that day when Regina almost died. Her worst day. Their worst day. And she’d been told that Hook had a part in it, but then there had been the trigger and Neverland and saving Henry and Pan’s curse and, fuck, everything else. She hadn’t really thought about what his part might be, because he had the beans that they needed to get to Neverland. She had overlooked the fact that he’d stolen the beans for himself in the first place, and she hadn’t asked about the rest of it. She hadn’t asked Regina and she hadn’t asked Hook, and she should have. She should have found out what he’d done. She should have cared enough about the woman she claimed to be in love with to find out what had actually happened to her. But she’d never been able to ask because she couldn’t stand to think about it. And, yeah, she’d put her own emotional well-being before Regina’s because she was shit at relationships.

“I’m sorry!” It burst out of her in a howl, and that wasn’t how a normal person apologised. She exhaled slowly, tightening her hands into fists and trying to rein herself in. “I’m sorry.”

“You don’t need to apologise for him.” Regina’s anger was receding, her voice returning to its baseline testiness.

“Not for him. For me. For all the times when I should have been there for you and I wasn’t.”

Regina watched her for a few moments, weighing the statement and considering her answer. “You’re almost always there in your own way. You’ve been there more than anyone else in my life ever has.”

“And you deserve more than that. More than me.” She hung her head. “You deserve better than scraps and half-assed support.”

“And you need to stop apologising for the past when I’ve never asked for nor needed you to do so. If I had any problems with you, do you honestly doubt for one second that I would not tell you so to your face? There are a thousand little things—and big things—that you and I should have handled differently. But we didn’t, and we can’t change that. You run and I lash out: that is who we are. But you are definitely not responsible for the things done or said by Killian Jones.”

“Come on, we’re talking about torture. You almost fucking died that day.”

“He and I have almost killed the other many times over the years. Thus far, we have not succeeded.”

“But I could have lost you!”

“And I did lose you, to a man so lacking in basic decency, so far beneath you in every way! You chose him, you gave yourself to him, and that hurt a hell of a lot more than any physical torture!” Regina’s eyes widened as she realised what she had admitted. She clenched her jaw. “The spell—”

“Jesus, Regina, don’t go there again. I get that it’s making us admit things we might not have otherwise said, but it’s not making us lie.” She was shuddering from too much emotion. “Hook is what I thought I should want, all I thought I could have. He isn’t you! He isn’t my everything.” She shook her head. “Fuck, I just wish that—”

“Do not finish that statement.”

“What?”

Regina’s face was pure frustration. “This spell which you won’t let me discuss responds to your wishes. The thing I value most is that whatever we are to each other has always been real. Even when it was messy and hate-filled and vengeful, it was real. Anything you wish for now might very well come true, and we would never know whether it was real or the spell. And I don’t want that.”

Emma deflated instantly. “Why can’t our lives be about something other than shitty fucking magic?”

Regina laughed, a cold sound devoid of humour. “I think that ship has well and truly sailed.”

Emma shook her head, the comment somehow pulling the last of her anger from her, leaving mostly a sense of being so very tired. She wished that—shit, no, she couldn’t think like that. Hold on. There was something else, something important there.

“Just my wishes?” She tilted her head as she thought through what Regina had been saying. She was quite specific about Emma’s wishes being the issue. “Why not our wishes?”

“The spell doesn’t react to mine, only yours.”

“You tried?”

“Yes.”

Emma might not always be able to read Regina accurately because her own feelings often got in the way, but she recognised that look, the I’m-hiding-something-I’m-embarrassed-about look. And she felt her confidence—and her lust, definitely her lust, always her lust—return as she thought about the exact moment that Regina had realised that it was a wish curse. That image was burned in her brain forever, all skin and lingerie and boots and perfect, breathy moans. And she’d verbalised a wish for Emma to be inside her, only that had come true, so she had to be thinking of something else.

“And what exactly did you wish for?” She took a step towards Regina.

“It’s hardly important.” Downward glance, lip between her teeth: that was a lie, or at least something she didn’t want to admit.

“Tell me.” Emma reached out and pulled Regina to her, marvelling at how quickly they had gone from shouting and fury back to this. It could be the spell, she supposed, but it was far more likely that it was them. Together, they were every emotion all at once. Maybe back in real Storybrooke they wouldn’t cycle through them so quickly, or maybe they would. But they’d probably always be a thing of extremes. It would never be boring. And hopefully it would always be real.

Regina wound her arms around Emma’s waist and leaned in until her mouth was by Emma’s ear.

“I wished for you to be naked so I could fuck myself against you.”

Emma groaned. It was bad enough that Regina could bend her will just by using Emma’s name, but this ability to reduce her to nothing more than insensible lust was so un-fucking-fair.

“Okay, I officially don’t care who cast this spell because we need to make that happen right fucking now.” She tipped her head back as Regina’s mouth started moving against her neck, leaving what was going to be a very noticeable hickey—assuming, of course, they ever met anyone who would notice it. “We should go back to my house. I’m too old for doing this outdoors.”

Regina laughed. “One, you’re never too old to do this outdoors and, two, we’re going to the B&B to find out if I’m right about Hook.”

“Says who?”

“Me. And you don’t want to cross me, Emma.”

“Because I don’t know what you’re capable of?”

“On the contrary,” Regina’s hands dropped to Emma’s ass, pulling her even closer, “because you’ve experienced exactly what I’m capable of, and you’ll not get to experience it again if you don’t do as I say.”

“That is entirely unfair.”

With a final kiss to Emma’s neck, Regina stepped back and admired the mark she’d left there. “Yes, it is. Feel free to file a complaint with my office when we return.”

Yup. Things with Regina Mills would never, ever be boring.

+

Hook’s room had once been Emma’s, when she first came to town. Every time she had been there, her mind had always gone to that second meeting, Regina offering the basket of apples, and how much she had wanted her, even then. She mentioned as much to Regina, who had preened at the compliment.

“You were quite distracting in your underwear yourself,” Regina said.

“You wanted me too?”

“No, I wanted you gone.” Her gaze travelled up and down Emma’s body. “But I have eyes. I can appreciate what’s in front of me, even if I didn’t want to sample it then.”

Emma picked up some of Hook’s things as they both moved around the room. There wasn’t much to look at. He didn’t own much, and had little need for most of the trappings of the modern world. There wasn’t even a radio, never mind a television. Emma was familiar with most of his things, and nothing looked out of place or particularly new.

“So, if I’d propositioned you, what would you have said?”

Regina shrugged. “I would probably have acted offended to see if spurning you would cause you to back down. If that hadn’t worked, I would probably have had sex with you, thinking that it was as good a way as any to bend you to my will.”

“But only for leverage, not because you wanted me?”

“Aw, am I hurting your feelings?” Regina shot her a sarcastic grin. “You’re the prettiest girl I’ve ever seen. Better?”

Emma pulled open a chest of drawers and rifled through it. “I could just wish for you to tell me the truth.”

Regina growled, as if Emma was spoiling all her fun. “Fine. Whatever. There has never been a time when I found you not-attractive. And I would not have been repelled by the idea of sex with you just for its own sake.”

Emma clutched her hand to her chest. “Wow, my heart, with the compliments and the romance.”

“Stop being such a princess. You know fine well that I wanted you back then, and you’re just fishing for compliments.” Regina stopped her searching and leaned against the wall.

“Actually, no, I didn’t know that.” Emma turned to face her, sitting on top of the chest of drawers.

“Seriously?” Regina scowled in disbelief.

“I’m being entirely serious.”

“Not even that day at the mine?”

“What about it?”

“I could barely keep my hands from you. All I wanted to do was take you back to my office and fuck you until one of us broke.”

Emma moaned. “Okay, whenever we get back to real Storybrooke, there has to be a rule about when you can use that word, because it’s not fair that you have a second superpower.”

“A second superpower?” Regina was pushing herself off the wall and walking towards her.

“Like you don’t already know about the name thing.”

“What name thing, Em-ma?” She grinned, drawing the two syllables out almost indecently.

“That.” She hung her head. There was no way to win with this woman, although she wasn’t really bothered about losing. Not when Regina was now standing between her legs, her hand back on her neck, kneading all the tension away. And not when Regina’s free hand was guiding Emma’s hand to her hip. She took the hint and pulled Regina against her, tucking her head under the other woman’s chin.

“I have always wanted you. Always.” Regina’s voice was soft and low and reassuring. “From the first day we met and every day since, no matter how bad things got, no matter how futile and pointless it seemed.” She pressed a kiss to the top of Emma’s head.

They stayed like that for a short while and Emma thought that maybe that being held like this was her new favourite thing. Not that sex and kissing and everything else wasn’t incredible, because it was, but the feeling of completeness she felt in Regina’s arms was something she had literally never dreamt of because it had never occurred to her that something quite so perfect could exist.

“Do you sense that?” Regina said.

“Magic?”

“Mmm, it’s traces of the spell.” Regina stepped a foot or so back and waved her free hand through the air, her fingers spread as if combing through water. “You don’t feel it?”

“No.” All Emma felt was the loss of Regina. “You know I’m not good with this stuff.”

“Try for me.”

Emma closed her eyes and let her hand drift up to shoulder height. She moved her hand around, but nothing happened. She opened one eye to see Regina biting back a laugh.

“What’s so funny?”

“Your I’m-concentrating-on-magic face is quite precious.”

Emma opened both eyes and let her hand fall to her thigh. “I’m glad I amuse you.”

“Oh, you do much more than amuse me.” Regina’s eyes flashed with something that wasn’t humour. “But I need you to feel this spell, too.”

“Why?”

“Because no-one will believe me on my own. When we return, they will think I kidnapped you against your will.”

“No, they won’t. Not when they’ve heard the truth.”

“They’ll still believe the worst of me unless you back me up.” Regina’s half-turn away and downcast eyes showed that she believed that to be true. Still, after all these years, she thought people would only see her as the villain. “Just try again.”

“How?”

Regina pulled her up and came to stand behind her, placing one hand on Emma’s waist and the other on her shoulder. “Reach out with your own magic. Try to sense the other magic in the room. It’s old magic, from the Enchanted Forest, rich and earthy. If you concentrate, you should find it easily, even over the overpowering man-stench.” She wrinkled her nose in distaste. “Does that pirate never wash?”

It was a deflection, one which Emma was willing to let slide for now, because convincing Regina that people saw her as more than her Evil Queen persona was a bigger fight for another day.

“You want me to concentrate with you standing behind me like that?” She looked over her shoulder and Regina was blushing. It looked good. It looked better to know that she’d caused it. She could make Regina happy. That made her feel about fifty feet tall.

“Concentrate, Emma, and I’ll take you home and fuck you until one of us breaks.”

Her knees almost buckled at the whispered command. “That’s low.”

“No, it’s a promise.” She tapped Emma’s shoulder. “Try again.”

Magic was emotion, and there was a surfeit of that in Fake Storybrooke, so she evened out her breathing, letting herself feel Regina’s warmth at her back and how that made her feel love and lust and a strong sense of belonging. She tried to connect with Regina’s magic first, and it happened more easily than ever before. It was beautiful, a thing of light and every good feeling.

“I feel you,” she said, letting herself lean back into Regina.

“I know.” Regina sent out a signal across their connection, and a shiver of lust passed along Emma’s body, settling between her thighs, where she was already starting to throb with want again just from their closeness.

“Do you teach all your students like this?” Her voice was a lot breathier than she wanted it to be.

“Only the ones who need extra incentive.”

“Good to know.” She let herself bask in the heat of Regina’s connection for a few seconds, and then reached out again. She could sense that there was something else there, something which was neither her nor Regina. “I think I feel it.”

“Tell me.” Regina’s voice was right by her ear.

“It’s like smoke, dark and heavy smoke, like when you burn leaves in a backyard fire.”

“Good. That’s very good. Follow it with your mind, let it lead you.”

She concentrated on the smoke, tried to imagine what it would smell like. She thought it would be heavy and acrid and almost chemical, and she ran her tongue over the roof of her mouth, as if she might be able to taste it. Rich and earthy, Regina had said, and that made her think of forests and fields, but that wasn’t where her mind was going. She could clearly see paper—no, it was too heavy and yellowed for paper, so it had to be parchment— burning in a large bowl, made of metal or possibly pewter. The flame glowed blue-green, lighting the darkness of her imagination and then she could see the whole room in her mind. Worse, she saw him. She gasped and slumped backwards against Regina.

“What is it? Are you all right?” Regina’s arms were around her waist, holding her up.

“No, no, it’s fine. I’m fine.” Emma opened her eyes and tried to regain her balance and bearings. “It’s just, I saw him. Hook. I saw him casting the spell by burning a parchment in this weird ceremonial bowl thing and mumbling something.”

Regina manoeuvred them around until they were back in their starting position, Emma perched on the edge of the chest of drawers, her head cradled to Regina’s chest, sure hands stroking through her hair and massaging her neck. It was only when she settled in that position that she realised that her heart had been racing and that she was covered in a sheen of sweat.

“I know it kinda had to be, but I still can’t believe it was him,” she said.

“And you actually saw him performing the spell?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve never heard of anyone being able to see a spell being cast before.”

“That’s not what you saw?” Emma pulled back enough to see Regina smiling down at her in a combination of worry and pride.

“No. I could only sense the kind of spell and the fact that it had been cast here. Tracing the magic back is not something which is supposed to be possible, although there are legends that it happened in the past, centuries ago.” She kissed Emma’s forehead. “Your magic never ceases to amaze me. The fact that such power has been wasted on you is one of life’s great mysteries.”

Emma wanted to retaliate, but she was so tired that she could hardly move at all. “I’d hit you for that,” she said, “but lifting my arm seems to be more effort than I can manage. Do you think you can poof us home?” She was finding it hard just to stay awake.

“Yes, sweet Emma, I can do that.”

+

When she woke, it was dark, but that meant nothing when it had been dark for three whole days. She was in her bed, wearing shorts and a tank top, although she didn’t ever remember getting changed. The space next to her was warm, so Regina couldn’t be far away. She grinned at the thought that they’d finally made it to a bed and that Regina had stayed with her while she slept. Yawning and stretching, she rolled over and up into a seated position. It was warmer than it had been, which was most likely Regina’s doing as well. She checked her phone screen. Almost eight, so she’d been out for probably six hours. Six hours in a bed with Regina next to her which she had wasted with sleeping.

The bedroom door was open and candlelight flickered beyond. She pushed herself off the bed and went through to the hall. Regina was sitting on the couch, feet tucked under herself, book in hand. She was wearing a grey silk robe Emma had never seen before and, from what Emma could see, nothing underneath. She looked in Emma’s direction and pushed her reading glasses up onto the top of her head.

“You’re awake, princess.”

“And you weren’t in bed with me.”

Regina put her book down and stood, crossing the room to meet her and pulling her into a hug. “Your stomach was growling, even in your sleep, so I thought I should make us something to eat. There’s lasagne in the oven.”

“Sunday night special,” Emma nodded sleepily and nuzzled against Regina’s cheek.

“Indeed.”

“Kid’ll be sorry he missed it.” Sundays meant family night. Lasagne. Pie and ice-cream.

“I can make it one night this week when we’re back.” Her fingertips traced up and over Emma’s bicep until she reached her shoulder. She pushed Emma back. “Sit, and I shall feed you.”

“You’d make an awesome wife,” Emma said before her conscious mind caught up with her mouth.

“I doubt my first husband would agree.” Regina gave her a pointed stare and moved through to the kitchen, which allowed Emma to stare at her bare legs and get a flash of ass here and there.

“For me, I meant.” Possibly not an improvement on her original statement, but definitely the truth. Regina just shook her head.

“Sit down and stop talking.”

Probably a good idea, she thought. Sometimes it was better to say nothing. This was probably one of those times. Only, she’d never been very good at following advice of any kind.

“You should’ve woken me sooner,” she said as Regina brought her over a glass of water with plenty of ice and laid the plates down.

“Magic is tiring. You needed the rest.”

“We were only there for, like, five minutes.”

“You were out for over thirty minutes.” Regina returned with a serving dish and ladled two portions of lasagne onto plates, one almost double the size of the other.

“In Hook’s room, when I was following the spell?”

“Yes.”

“It felt like about thirty seconds.”

“Magic’s like that. It’s not always in real time.” Regina pushed her food around her plate, taking only tiny bites, but smiling in approval as Emma wolfed hers down. “He looks just like you when he eats.”

“Like a barbarian with no manners?”

“Like you appreciate my cooking and you fear that you might never eat again.”

“It’s an old foster home habit in my case. It’s also why, whenever I get steak in a restaurant, I eat the meat first, ’cause that was always the thing people would steal. No kid ever tried to take your broccoli. No idea why the kid’s so worried, though. You’re not gonna steal from his plate.”

“You would.”

Emma laughed. “Yeah, I would, but he’s big enough now to slap my hand away when I try.”

“Well, eat up anyway.”

“Why?”

Regina smiled, leaning back in her chair and crossing her legs, which caused the silk robe to ride way up, every movement tracked by Emma’s eyes. Then she trailed her fingers over her sternum and down between her breasts, pushing the silk aside enough that Emma got more than a glimpse of naked skin beneath.

“Because I distinctly remember promising you a reward for your efforts earlier, and a lady never reneges on a promise.”

Emma pushed her chair from the table and unceremoniously lifted Regina from her chair, groaning with pleasure when she felt strong thighs wrapping around her waist and the distinct feeling of wetness against her abdomen, even through her thin tank top.

“Not hungry anymore?” Regina asked, her fingers threading into Emma’s hair.

“Not for lasagne, anyway.”


	7. Monday Morning

When Emma woke, it was dark and the house was mostly silent, so she let her eyes drift shut again. Her first thought was that she must have moved in the middle of the night, because she’d gone to sleep with her head tucked into Regina’s shoulder, legs tangled together, arms wrapped around each other. Actually, she’d fallen asleep for the first time right on top of Regina, although she had no doubt that Regina would want to categorise that as having made her pass out from incredible sex. It would be hard to argue otherwise: Regina had promised to fuck her until one of them broke, and Emma was pretty sure she’d achieved that.

She reached her arm out to find Regina, but hit nothing but cold air.

Her eyes snapped open. She wasn’t naked, she wasn’t in bed and Regina wasn’t beside her. She was on the couch and she was wearing the pyjamas bottoms and college sweatshirt she’d woken up in on Friday morning. The digital display on the microwave ahead of her read 6.47am.

“Regina?”

Nothing.

“Regina!”

This was probably another dream, she thought. Close her eyes, wake up again, and Regina would be there, maybe even with that look in her eyes that said Emma was special. That could work. Yeah, that would definitely work. She squeezed her eyes shut, but she was still alone on the couch when she opened them again.

“Regina!”

A rumble from the refrigerator caught her attention, and her head snapped around, unused to the noises of everyday life after days of silence only broken by the two of them. It scared her. She was honest-to-God scared, because working fridges and blinking microwaves were not part of the Storybrooke where Regina was kinda-maybe hers. She liked that Storybrooke. Fake Storybrooke had naked Regina, who held Emma like she was the most precious thing and was all pretty and hot and sexy and, well, naked.

Panic rising in her gut. Jesus, not this again. No. Not fair. Not happening. No, no, no.

Maybe this wasn’t some kind of magic thing. Maybe Regina had woken up in the middle of the night and realised that Emma wasn’t what she wanted after all, so she’d gone home. Only that was so much more terrifying than the thought that it was only magic fucking with her life. They hadn’t said the words, but she was sure they loved each other. They hadn’t just been fucking: they had been making love. The sex had gone from rough and fast to sweet and slow then back again, but always tender. Being with Regina was better than anything Emma could have wished for. And maybe Regina wasn’t in love with her the way Emma was completely in love with her, but it had felt like that. No-one could have faked the levels of emotional intensity they had shared.

She scrabbled up from the sofa, hurried to her bedroom. Her bed was unmade, but the sheets were still tucked in on one side, and there was only one indentation in her pillows. The bag with Regina’s clothes was not on the chair by the bed, only the long-sleeved tee she had been wearing on Thursday, the one she’d ripped on a stray nail in Mrs Dubchek’s garage while investigating the theft of some power tools. Regina’s robe was not on the floor. The plate from the midnight snack she’d brought for Emma—‘I cannot believe you are going to eat cold lasagne,’ she had said, but the eyes were soft and the smile was tender, and it was definitely love, because it had to be, couldn’t be anything else—was not by the bed.

“Regina!”

Think, think. What was happening? What did she need to know?

“Henry!” she shouted. “You here, kid?”

She dashed through to his room. It wasn’t exactly as it had looked on Friday morning. The book bag which had been on his chair, and which Regina had moved to the bed, was gone. His cellphone was not on the bedside locker. His wardrobe door was open and some of his favourite clothes were missing. Someone had been there and taken his things.

Phone. She needed her phone.

She sprinted back to the couch, stubbing her toe on the coffee table as she skidded to a halt.

“Jesus fucking shit!” It hurt like a bastard, and she awkwardly lifted her foot to rub it before retrieving her phone.

The lock screen told her that it was Monday, and that she had over twenty missed calls and a bunch of unread messages from Henry, Snow, David and Ruby. Scanning them, she saw that most dated back to Friday, but there were a few from Saturday and Sunday as well, all on the same theme of ‘where are you?’ The most reassuring message was a voicemail from her father, saying that he and Snow had taken Henry to their apartment for the time being. At least her son was safe.

She moved to her front door and opened it, looking out on the street and seeing people moving around in the Carpenters’ house, going about their daily routine. The sounds of nature and cars making their early-morning way around town filled the air.

Definitely real Storybrooke. She was definitely home.

Alone.

And then a new thought occurred to her: what if the spell hadn’t been real at all? What if she had been stranded by herself and the Regina in Fake Storybrooke was as fake as everything else there? What if it had all been a figment of Emma’s imagination? What if she had merely wished a Regina who actually returned her feelings into existence? What if the real Regina had been at home in the mansion for the weekend, thinking Emma had disappeared without Henry?

And why, in the name of God and all things fucking holy, did she have to keep coming up with new nightmare scenarios?

She dashed back down the hallway and checked herself in the full-length mirror on the back of the bathroom door. She might have been wearing Friday morning’s clothes, but she had a prominent hickey on her neck. She lifted her sweatshirt and turned around. Yep, those were nail marks on her back. And she saw a bruise just above her hip, sustained while colliding hard with the door handle as she carried Regina through to the bedroom.

Of course, a fake Regina could have left real marks.

Shit. God-fucking-damn-it and shit.

There was only one way to find out what was real and what wasn’t. Without any further thought, she closed her eyes and focused all her energy and emotion into a single thought: Regina.

When she opened her eyes, she was in the Mayoral mansion, her stomach queasy from the teleportation and her heart pounding from the fear that she might learn something she didn’t want to know.

“Regina?”

She headed towards the master bedroom, taking the stairs two at a time. She yanked open the door, only to find the room empty. The bed had not been slept in, but there were clothes strewn across on the floor, which was the least Regina-like thing Emma could imagine. She cast her mind back to Thursday, when she and Regina had met for lunch at Granny’s. Regina had been wearing a grey pencil skirt, cream blouse and her black leather jacket, which was exactly what was lying on the floor, along with a white lace bra that Emma figured would be almost entirely see-through when worn. It would probably be completely translucent after Emma’s mouth had been pressed against it, licking and sucking and teasing, forcing that little moaning noise from Regina.

Concentrate, she ordered herself. It was so not the time for thinking about her favourite subject.

Again, she closed her eyes and tried to quiet her mind entirely, letting her magic tell her all she needed to know.

Living room.

She hurried back down the stairs but moved more quietly when she reached the hall. The house was too silent for someone to be up and awake. There was no smell of coffee from the kitchen, and there was almost always coffee brewing because Regina mainlined the stuff. Yeah, something was way off about the situation, and she wished she’d bothered to get dressed and bring her badge and gun. Bare-footed and in PJs was no way to face danger.

She eased open the living room door, peeking her head around it. There was a distinct smell in the air, and it wasn’t coffee or even cider. It was whisky, rich and peaty. Emma slipped inside the room and was surprised to find Regina on the couch, snoring lightly, one hand on her belly, the other clutching a photograph. An open bottle of malt whisky sat next to a half-filled glass on the coffee table. Regina had missed the glass a few times, judging by the drying blobs of alcohol around it. More photographs were strewn across the coffee table and onto the floor in front of the couch.

As she got closer, Emma saw most of the pictures were of her and Henry; some, just of her. The one Regina was holding had always been one of Emma’s favourites. It had been taken in New York during a school trip to the batting cages. Emma was standing behind Henry, showing him how to swing without pulling his hips. He was staring up at her from beneath his helmet and she was laughing back at something he’d just said. The only thing which could have made the moment better would have been if Regina had been behind the camera and not the mother of one of Henry’s school friends.

Looking at the sleeping woman, at least she now had an explanation for Regina’s arriving at her house in disarray on Friday morning, although a hangover would have been Emma’s very last guess.

She knelt down on the floor and reached out her hand to rest on Regina’s cheek.

“Hey, beautiful.”

Regina jerked into wakefulness, her eyes unfocused before settling on Emma. Her face softened and she started to smile in return. And, hey, there was the special look which said love and home and belonging. This Regina had been with her in Fake Storybrooke, Emma knew.

“Hi.” Regina’s voice was hoarse from sleep and maybe from the guttural noises Emma had repeated coaxed from her over the last day, and it was still the sexiest thing Emma had ever heard. And for one perfect moment—the kind which could be replayed for years in her memory—everything in Emma’s life was good and pure and full of hope, because it all felt a lot like love.

But then Regina’s smile froze and her eyes narrowed, as she realised that they weren’t naked together and they weren’t in Emma’s Fake Storybrooke bed.

“We’re home.”

“Yeah. I guess the spell ended.”

“Henry?” Because of course that would be Regina’s first question.

“He’s with my parents. We can get dressed and go see him now, if you like.”

Regina nodded. “Yes, that would be best.” She was still waking, not quite herself yet, but she was hardening herself in way which was not the Regina who fed her late-night snacks and held her so very close. Hoping to stop the transformation before it could start, Emma reached out to smooth some hair from Regina’s forehead.

“I wish you’d been there when I woke up,” she said. “I missed you.”

“We’ve spent all weekend together. You can’t possibly have missed me already.” Regina pushed Emma’s hand away and sat up. Her lips pursed as she took in her surroundings. Seeing the photograph in her hand, Regina tossed it onto the table, as if she could pretend she hadn’t been clutching it to her chest in her sleep.

“Hey, come on. Don’t be like that. Of course I missed you.”

But Regina was already composing herself, smoothing out the wrinkles in her robe and running her fingers through her hair. Not that Emma cared what she looked like: Regina was always beautiful to her. She sank back on her knees and retrieved the photograph Regina had tossed aside.

“You know, we should do stuff like this together. Let the kid see that he has two moms who can deliver a mean pitch.” Regina-Emma-Henry, that was what she wanted and needed. She had hoped that was what Regina wanted too.

Regina blinked. “That’s hardly the most important order of business right now.”

“Really? ’Cause there’s nothing more important to me than us, than our family.”

“And not the fact that we’ve been caught up in a spell cast by your boyfriend?” Regina almost spat the final word. She stood up, stepping around Emma and starting to clear up the mess on the coffee table. “We were taken from our lives and exiled to another reality by magic. That’s tantamount to kidnapping. You’re the Sheriff, Emma. Why don’t you go do your job and arrest the perpetrator?”

“Because it’ll wait.”

“Lovely attitude. Do you treat all criminal activity in my town like this? Or just the major crimes involving people you’re dating?” Regina’s lip curled in disapproval.

Great. Emma took a deep breath. This was what she really hadn’t wanted, to be faced with the Regina of years ago who called her ‘Miss Swan’ in the bad way. Of course it had been too much to hope that she could have a normal life where she finally got to be with the woman she loved, after years of wanting and fantasising, and it was just good and easy and right. No, that wasn’t her life. Her life was waking up alone and stupid spells fucking with her and the woman she loved retreating back behind her barriers.

“It’s not as important as this.”

“Kidnapping is unimportant?”

“No. Of course it’s important, and, believe me, I will make sure he is prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” and she wasn’t even sure how she was going to do that, when there weren’t any statutes on the books for magical fuckery, “but this, you and me, is more important than anything. Do you have any idea how scared I was when I woke up this morning and you weren’t there?”

“I thought we had discussed yesterday that the spell was unravelling. It surely cannot have been a surprise to you that we have been returned here?” It was hard to tell if Regina was being deliberately obtuse—always a possibility when she wanted to avoid things—or was actually unmoved by events. Neither option was that great.

“That’s not what I’m saying either. What I’m saying is that you weren’t there, and I was all alone, and it scared me. It scared me because I didn’t know where you’d gone, and then I started to wonder if I had imagined everything that had happened this weekend, or if maybe it had been real, but you hadn’t been.”

Regina stared at the far wall, avoiding eye contact. “You’re making even less sense than usual.”

“For fuck’s sake! I was worried that the you who was with me in Fake Storybrooke was just someone I wished into existence, and not the real you at all. And that’s the worst thing I can imagine, because being with you was the best thing ever, and I couldn’t bear the idea that it hadn’t been real.” She stood, her hands on her hips, wishing that she was wearing something a lot more imposing than her ratty old sweats, and wishing she could look at Regina without remembering how it felt to be inside her, making her arch and thrust, begging Emma to stop-don’t stop-never stop-make her come-please don’t stop.

“Oh, so now you can’t tell the difference between the real me and your imagination?”

“Why are you being like so goddamned difficult? I’m just trying to say that I thought we were gonna wake up together and have a lazy morning in bed, maybe fool around a bit, and I’d even make you some of that hot tea you like and burn you some toast for breakfast. Instead, I woke up alone and scared and all I wanted was you to be there with me. And maybe I was hoping that you wanted that, too.”

Regina turned away, hiding her face from Emma. “Well, we don’t always get what we want in this life.”

“And you think I don’t know that?” Jesus, her whole life was one long list of things she had wanted, but had never got.

Regina ignored the question, picking up photographs from the floor and stacking them into a neat pile. Emma looked down at the one still in her hand, and it suddenly hit her what Regina had been doing. Drink plus wallowing in self-pity always equally unhappiness, usually caused by love. In fact, often caused by unrequited love, which could hardly be further from the truth. God, she loved Regina so much that she could hardly contain it.

“You were going to give me up,” she said, knowing it was true when Regina tensed at the accusation.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Hook. He asked you to stay away from me, and you were going to, weren’t you?”

“I already told you that I dismissed him and his allegations.” Regina wouldn’t look at her, though, and that was enough for Emma to know that it was a lie, or a half-truth at least.

Regina would only have given into Hook’s demands for her own reasons, not because of him at all. It had to mean that she was doing it for Emma. Regina must love her back.

“Yeah, but you never told me what you were going to do about what he said. You were going to back off and let me be with him. That’s what all these photos and the drinking’s about.”

“As if I would do what he asked of me.” Regina tightened the belt of her robe in a classic defensive gesture.

“No, you wouldn’t. But I think you would do whatever you thought was best for those you loved.” She took a half-step forward, reaching out to lay her hand on Regina’s forearm. “I think you would do whatever you thought was best for me.” It was a gamble, she knew. Pushing Regina could only ever go one of two ways, victory or disaster. She might not be given to showing her emotions, but Regina felt things more deeply than anyone Emma had ever known. There were never any half-measures with her.

“And why should I ever do that?”

“Because you love me.”

“That’s preposterous.”

“No, it’s not. I love you and you love me.” It wasn’t exactly how she wanted to profess her love to another person for the first time since Neal, but she could feel Regina slipping away from her. “I’m in love with you and you damn well know it, and I think that maybe you’re in love with me too.”

“Emma, you know this is not who we are out here.” Regina’s hand swirled in the air, indicating the town. It still wasn’t an outright denial, though.

“How is it not?”

“You have a boyfriend. You have a family. Here, we are friends, nothing more.”

“Not now. Not after this weekend. You get that, right? You get that it’s you and me now? There’s no way I’d ever go back to Hook. I love you. I want to be with you.” Jesus. Why was this so hard?

Regina’s eyes were soft again, but sad—so achingly sad. “Oh, Emma. Life doesn’t work like that.”

“Why the hell not?” She curled her hands into fists. “That look I get when I see you? I’m not cursed or under a spell or infected by some potion when you’ve seen that look every fucking day for years now. The way I look at you is because that’s how I feel for you. I want you. I love you. I’m in love with you. And maybe I needed a spell to act upon it, but it doesn’t make it any less real.”

“There’s no point discussing this.”

“Yes, there is. There is because this is who we are. Yesterday, that was what we could be together. Because we are so much better together than apart.” She shook her head. “And you didn’t need any potion or spell to make you love me, either.”

“We were in an alternate reality with heightened emotions and no consequences. You cannot expect how we behaved there to be replicated here.”

Emma threw her hands up. “You don’t stop loving someone just because there are other people around.”

“Funny. You seemed to have a problem admitting your feelings until there was no-one else around to see.” Regina’s jaw tensed and her eyes flashed with anger, and there—finally, at last—was the woman whom Emma knew, the one who brimmed with rage and had a talent for invective, but then Regina shook her head, her shoulders slumping. “We shouldn’t have given in to what we were feeling. It was a foolish mistake.”

She should have known this would happen. This, this pain she was feeling, was why she didn’t let people in; this was why she didn’t do relationships.

“It wasn’t a mistake. What happened between us could never be a mistake. I fucking love you.” Tears were stinging at her eyes, but she wasn’t going to cry. No crying, no crying, no crying. She wasn’t one of those kids, one of the weak kids. “And you love me.”

“I will always be there for you, whenever you need me. But anything more than that isn’t a possibility here. You must see that?”

Oh my God. She was being friend-zoned. That was up there with ‘It’s not you; it’s me’. What the fuck had she been thinking, expecting even a little bit of happiness for herself?

“No, I don’t get that. I want to be with you. I think you want to be with me. So, I’m really, really not seeing what the problem is here. Is it the gay thing?”

Regina snorted. “You’re not serious?”

And she wasn’t, not really, but she was willing to clutch at any straw which was something other than ‘Emma Swan isn’t good enough’, which seemed to be the gist of Regina’s argument.

“Well, then, what? Why can’t we be together?”

“That is not in our destinies.”

“Are you fucking kidding me right now with the fairytale crap? I get that you all buy this shit, but we’re in twenty-first century America. Your destiny is whatever you make it.”

“How very trite.” Regina gave her an even more disdainful look. “Tell me, did you get that from Oprah, or perhaps a fortune cookie?”

Emma took a deep breath. Calm. She needed to be calm. Shouting and crying were not the answer here.

“Are you scared?”

“Scared? Whatever do I have to be scared of?” But there was enough of a flicker across Regina’s face that Emma suspected she’d hit a nerve.

“I dunno.” She shrugged. “Lots of things. What will other people think? Will it last? Maybe some of the same things I was scared of when I woke up. Maybe it wasn’t real. Maybe it was just the spell. But, it’s not. Well, it wasn’t for me. And I get that love is a scary thing, but that’s okay, too.”

“I have never cared what others think of me.”

“Henry? Me?”

“You’re not others.” Regina scowled as she realised what she was admitting. “I mean—” She shook her head. “We should get dressed and go see Henry, rather than wasting our time with this pointless conversation.” Without waiting for Emma to reply, Regina swirled her hand and light smoke enveloped them both. When it cleared, they were both fully dressed and on the street outside David and Snow’s apartment.

“This isn’t over,” Emma said.

“Oh, but that’s where you’re entirely wrong. This is very much over.”


	8. Monday Morning/Evening

Before they even entered the apartment, Emma realised that Regina had dressed her in what passed for her Sheriff’s uniform: boots, jeans, red leather jacket, badge and gun hooked onto her favourite belt. She was also wearing the same sweater from the day before, the Christmas present sweater, clean and pressed and smelling like a fresh summer’s day. Maybe she was reaching, but that small gesture seemed to imply that Regina didn’t completely regret what had happened between them, no matter what she had said before. But it was hard to tell because Regina wouldn’t look at her, wouldn’t allow Emma to get a read on her, and resisted when Emma tried to pull her around to face her. She twisted away from Emma’s grasp and knocked on the door of the apartment.

It started well, with Henry running in a very un-teen-like fashion straight into Regina’s arms, and Emma was a complete sucker for that shit. Seeing Henry and Regina happy together never got old, not even for a second. Then the kid pulled her into the hug as well, and Regina didn’t object. And Emma wasn’t above using any opportunity to play dirty, so she wrapped her arm around Regina’s waist, and made sure that they were tight against each other. Maybe she was reaching again, but it felt like Regina was leaning into Emma harder than she needed to, and that her palm wasn’t just accidentally pressed against Emma’s thigh. If Emma squinted just right, she could pretend that they were the only three people in the room. Hell, with her eyes shut and her arms around the two people she loved most, she could pretend that they were the only three people in the world.

Henry was babbling away about how he’d been worried and how they’d looked and looked and looked for them. In that moment, he was both that ten-year-old kid who showed up at her front door and changed her life irrevocably and also far too tall to be that little boy anymore. While Emma was paying attention to everything that he said, and drinking in the solidity of him in her embrace, she stayed focused on Regina, too. Then Henry asked what they’d done all weekend and Regina inclined her head towards Emma. For a second or two, Regina’s eyes melted to soft, tender, loving, with just enough of a smirk to hint that she might be remembering every intimate moment. And the world slowed down completely, narrowed until it was just them and no-one else, just Emma looking at Regina, and Regina looking back. It was just Emma tilting her head and challenging Regina with her eyes, even as she felt a blush spreading across her cheeks, asking her wordlessly to admit that what they had together had been real and worthwhile and good.

Regina nodded.

Regina nodded, and Emma grinned like her face could split in two, because maybe it had just been a panic attack. Regina woke up and had a full-on panic attack, which would make complete sense, because Regina, even more than Emma, thought that the world was out to get her. And, to be fair, she had every right to think that, because the woman had a couple of lifetimes’ worth of the world being out to get her. Everyone Regina loved was dead or taken from her: Daniel and Henry Senior and Cora and Zelena and Robin and Henry, all lost by her own hand or another’s. Emma had been the one to take her most recent happy endings away—first Henry, and then Robin—and Emma got that, which was why she had tried to apologise repeatedly over the weekend. And love scared the crap out of Emma, but it had to be utterly terrifying for Regina.

She knew what she had to do. She had to be strong and brave and fearless and all the things which people expected the Saviour to be, and which Emma rarely was. She had to be sure enough for both of them, and she had to project that certainty to Regina, show her that she wouldn’t back down, that she wasn’t scared or unsure of anything.

Then Regina blinked and turned back to Henry, giving him her special Mom smile and insisting that they had spent all their time trying to work out how to get home to him, but she looked back up at Emma, and there was the start of something in her eyes, like she, too, wished her future could be the three of them.

When they broke apart, Emma saw that Snow had one of her about-to-cry looks on her face and the kidlet—also known as the baby brother, the munchkin, the little man, the tyke, anything which meant she didn’t have to call him Neal—nestled on her hip. David was behind his wife, giving Emma a sheepish grin. No matter how awkward their relationship was, they were still parents who had missed their daughter, in the same way that she and Regina were parents who had missed their son, so Emma let herself be welcomed into another group hug. This second hug was stiffer and a lot shorter than Regina-Emma-Henry. She held on a little longer than she wanted to, but probably nowhere near as long as her sniffling mother would have preferred.

And then the questions started in earnest, and Regina was no help with that, leaving Emma to tell her parents and son as much of their weekend as possible while still leaving out what was, for her, the most important detail. Regina stood behind their son, her hands on his shoulders, keeping him as a barrier between herself and the rest of the Charmings, or maybe just between herself and Emma. Sure and strong and fearless, she thought, moving around to stand beside Regina, because that was where she belonged now. It was where she should always have been: shoulder-to-shoulder with the woman she loved.

She told her parents and Henry about the empty town with its weird stillness and pervasive darkness and how they’d looked everywhere for clues, combed the whole town for magic, until they found the barrier. She ignored her mother’s disapproving looks at having gone into the mines—‘They’re so dangerous, Emma,’ like there weren’t much worse dangers invited into their homes every day, like Snow hadn’t picked the goddamned Wicked Witch as her own midwife—and tried to keep her focus on David, because he was her Deputy as well as her father. As long as she was looking at him, she could try to remain strong and stoic and be the Sheriff, because his daughter, Emma, wanted to tell the world, starting with her family, that she was helplessly in love with Regina. But, if Regina wanted her in Sheriff mode, then that was what she’d give her.

And then, of course, someone had to say something stupid. She had expected that it would be her mother, because Snow was the person most likely to open their mouth without thinking, but it was her father. Her own damned father was the one to let her down.

“That all sounds terrible, Emma. It must have been horrible for you,” he said, like that was the only obvious conclusion which could be drawn from what she’d said.

“Being stuck with me, you mean?” Regina said. Emma winced, expecting the shit to hit the fan. She glanced at Regina, who had her very tightest trying-not-to-commit-murder smile plastered across her face, and then back at her father, who probably hadn’t been trying to imply any such thing. At least, not intentionally, and not to Regina’s face.

“Uh, no, that’s not what I meant. I meant it must have been terrible for both of you, being stuck with each other,” David said, although it really wasn’t much of an improvement. “I mean, being isolated from everyone. You know, being stranded together.” His eyes were pleading with Emma to help him out.

“The worst part was not knowing what had happened to Henry,” she said, turning to look at Regina before repeating what she had told her the first day in the diner. “But there’s no-one else I’d rather be stranded with than Regina. She’s my best friend.” She turned to Henry. “And we’re like this awesome magic-fighting superhero team, your Mom and me. She’s the one who figured everything out. She’s the one who knew what to do and where to look, and kept me from killing myself by launching myself through a barrier to God-knows-where. She’s the one who kept us sane and got us back here safely.” She turned back to her parents. “And she’s the one who knew it was Killian who cast the spell.”

“Killian?” Snow said. “But that’s impossible! He loves you!”

“No, that can’t be right. It must have been someone else. He would never do such a thing,” her father said.

Regina raised her eyebrow at Emma. She’d said no-one would believe her, and now Emma’s parents were proving her right. Deep, even breaths, Emma told herself.

“Yes, he would. He did. I saw him.”

“How could you have seen him, Emma?” Snow asked.

“We went to the B&B, and I sensed him.”

“You sensed him?” Her father sounded sceptical.

“Regina showed me how to follow a spell with my magic, so I did, and, then—bam!—I was right there in the room with him on Thursday and saw him casting it.”

“That’s not even possible, Emma,” Snow said, her brow furrowed. “Even in our world, magic doesn’t work like that. You would need a totem, like a dream catcher, and even then it would only work on memories. You cannot look into someone else’s past like it was a movie.”

“I can. I did. I’m telling you, I saw him.” Emma folded her arms over her chest.

“Your daughter is more talented than I could ever have imagined,” Regina said, and Emma shot her a glare, because saying that they could never be together and then taunting her parents with knowledge they didn’t possess about them having been together was un-fucking-fair and Regina knew it. But Regina seemed to be gloating about the statement, like she was proud of what had happened, so Emma would let it slide. Regina was difficult and contrary and hard work, and hell if Emma didn’t love her all the more for that. Emma didn’t really want easy. She liked that Regina was a challenge: it made the good times all the more worth savouring.

“I still don’t believe Killian would do this. He’s good now. He loves you so much, Emma,” Snow said.

“Who do you think is to blame, then?” Regina asked, her body tight and her tone scornful, so obviously bracing herself for the accusation she was expecting.

“This has to be dark magic.” Snow frowned and adjusted Neal on her hip, looking down at his head briefly. Emma envied her brother for being unaware of his family dynamic. “We should ask Blue what the cause might be.”

“We don’t need to ask that damned fairy, Snow,” Regina said. “It was Jones. I sensed it, and Emma used her magic—her good, pure, born-of-True-Love magic—to follow the spell, and she saw him burning a parchment in a spell cup, making the incantation. It’s not like we used a dream catcher to pull a fake memory from a dog or anything.”

Emma rolled her eyes. Man, her family had the world’s most difficult shared history. What she wouldn’t give for their worst problems to be something normal, like an uncle who got overtly racist when he drank too much, or a stoner cousin who grew pot in the back yard.

“Right, here’s what happening,” she said, squaring her shoulders and butting in before her mother could say anything to make matters more awkward. “Regina and I are gonna take Henry to school—”

“But, Mom, I wanna stay with you today,” Henry said, wisely knowing that Regina was a bigger sucker for his puppy-dog eyes than Emma, who recognised one of her own cons when she saw it.

“I’d like that, too, darling,” Regina said. “But you don’t get to skip school just because of a spell.”

“No,” Emma said. “If that was the rule, we might as well tear the school down for all the use it’d get in this town.” Regina gave her a weak smile, while Henry pleaded with his eyes for her to give in and be the fun parent again. Not today, kid. “So, right, we take Henry to school, and you, Dad, are gonna arrest Killian and have him in the cells for when we get there.” It was cheating to call him Dad just to get him to do what she wanted, just like it was cheating for Henry to use the puppy-dog eyes on Regina, but the sappy look on David’s face told her that it had worked.

“We?” Regina and Snow chorused.

“Regina knows a lot more about this magic stuff than I do, so I need her there to help with the questioning.” Besides, she really didn’t want Regina out of her sight at all. Ever again, if possible. “So, you go get your things together, kid, and you can have the joy of being walked to school by both of your moms.” She gave him a sarcastic grin. “And, if you’re good, we’ll hold your hands and swing you between us like a big boy.”

Henry huffed a couple of times, but relented when he saw that it wasn’t working on either parent. Without him as a barrier, Regina looked small and lost. Emma tried to lean into her again, to offer her support through closeness, but Regina folded her arms across her chest and stepped aside.

“So, what else did you two get up to?” David asked, causing Emma to swing her head in his direction.

“What do you mean?” She was immediately defensive, wondering what he was implying.

“There can’t have been much to do with with no-one else there,” he said.

“Oh, you know, we found ways to entertain ourselves,” Regina said. “Braiding each other’s hair, telling ghost stories around the campfire, eating s’mores.”

David seemed taken aback by Regina’s curt tone, because they really were friends these days and any show of animosity was rare. But Emma figured from the way Regina was glowering at her, it was aimed at her, not her father. Either way, things were getting awkward, so Emma walked over and picked up her brother, dancing around with him in her arms as a distraction for all four adults in the room.

“Mom, Dad? Why don’t you go get Henry’s things together so I can pick them up later and take them over to Regina’s for him?”

David looked between her and Regina, then nodded. “Sure,” he said, putting his arm around Snow’s shoulder and ushering her away. Emma sighed with relief inwardly. She’d always suspected that her father knew how she felt about Regina, and his backwards glance at her confirmed as much.

“How about you, kidlet?” she asked Neal. “Did you miss me?” He giggled and hugged his little arms around her neck.

“Love you, Emma,” he said.

“And Regina?” She bounced over to the other woman, whom Emma knew to be a complete pushover for any child, but especially this one.

“Love you too, R’gina.” He beamed at Regina, easily coaxing a matching smile in response.

“And I love you, little one,” Regina replied, lifting him out of Emma’s arms. Like with Henry, Emma could watch Regina with Neal all day long. She was so radiant when she was being a mom. Unlike Emma, Regina was a natural with kids.

“I wish we’d have been able to raise Henry together at this age,” she said. “I know I’ve got all those memories you gave me, but they’re still not real, and I’d love to have seen you with him like this.”

“That would hardly have been possible with the curse.” Regina rocked Neal from side-to-side, smiling down at him.

“I know, but I still wish it.”

Regina shook her head. “Wishes are dangerous things. I thought you would have learned that this weekend.”

“I don’t regret a single thing about this weekend.” Emma reached out and smoothed her brother’s hair down. It was soft and silky against her palm, just like her implanted memories of Henry. “Except the fight we had this morning.”

“Don’t.”

“Don’t what?” She stepped back and folded her arms across her chest.

“We’ve had this conversation.”

Emma shrugged. “I don’t care. I love you.”

“Emma.” Neal shifted in Regina’s arms and started to play with her necklace, having no interest in the grown-up conversation going on around him.

“What? You don’t want to hear it? Then, fine, don’t listen. But it won’t make me stop. It won’t make it any less true. And I’m going to keep saying it until you believe me.”

“Now you’re just being stubborn.”

“Yup, I am. I still love you, though.” Strong and brave and fearless, she told herself. “And I’m not going to stop telling you so.”

Neal tugged particularly hard at Regina’s necklace, and she shifted him again, laying him out flat between her arms and then moving him around like an airplane, one of his favourite games. Emma congratulated herself on keeping him with them; it was hard to be too harsh when you were holding a toddler and making noises like a jet engine. They both enjoyed the simple laughter of the little boy between them for a few moments, then Regina gave Neal a final kiss before passing him back to Emma.

“Persistence is a fine thing, Emma, but it’s an approach which didn’t exactly work out for Hook, now, did it?”

And, just like that, she was shot down in flames.

+

The walk to school was awkward and tense and filled with strained looks between the women, although Henry’s constant conversation helped a little, because Regina never could maintain a bad mood around him. The second he ran into the schoolyard, however, she turned to Emma with her eyes blazing and her jaw set in a hard line.

“I’m going home,” she said, before Emma could speak. “I have no desire to stand in the background while you interrogate your boyfriend, and we both know that you don’t need me there. You saw what happened. This whole mess is between you and him, so you deal with it.” She turned on her heel and started walking away.

“This whole mess?” Emma called after her. “By that, do you mean the spell or the fact that you’re trying to pretend that you don’t love me back?” But Regina didn’t answer her or turn around. “Regina! Hold up.” Regina kept walking, and Emma had no choice but to break into a jog, wondering how a shorter woman wearing high heels could out-stride her quite so easily. “Regina. Come on, you can’t just ignore me.” Although the evidence seemed to point to the contrary.

The other woman finally stopped. “You have a key to the house. You can drop Henry’s things there this afternoon and I’ll pick him up from school. Or, don’t, and I’ll get them from your parents’ place later. Either way, text me to let me know what you’re doing.” With a quick glance up and down the street to check that she wasn’t being observed, Regina twirled her fingers and disappeared in a wisp of white smoke.

Emma’s head dropped back and she lifted her hands in a silent scream.

It took her twenty minutes to walk to the Sheriff’s station, twenty minutes in which six or seven texts demanding that Regina talk to her had gone unanswered, so she’d built up a pretty good head of steam by the time she got there. She was seriously considering leaving her father to deal with Killian while she poofed back to Regina’s house to continue their fight, even though she suspected that would be the wrong move. No matter what, she had to face Killian and deal with what he’d done to them.

Entering her office, she found her father at her desk, talking on the phone. He took one look at her and frowned.

“Emma just got here, so I’ll call you back later when I know more. Yeah, I love you too,” he said, and hung up. “That was your mother.”

Emma rolled her eyes. It was hardly likely to have been anyone else. “Is he in the cells?”

“Yes.”

“Where did you find him?”

“Drunk, in his room. I get the feeling he was expecting me. Or maybe you.”

“And you explained the charges?”

“I didn’t know what to charge him with, but I told him he was being arrested in connection with the disappearance of the Sheriff and the Mayor. I filled him in on what happened, and where you’ve both been.”

“Yeah, I haven’t figured it all out yet, either, but kidnapping and assault seem a good place to start.” Assault was probably a better choice than kidnapping. The last thing they needed was any trouble which might get the Feds interested in their magic-ridden town.

“For what it’s worth, I think he’s really sorry.”

“There’s a lot of really fucking sorry going around today. Doesn’t make any of it right. You coming with?” She didn’t wait for an answer, heading straight to the root of her most recent troubles. As soon as she saw him, sitting on the cot with his head hanging down, she lost it.

“What the actual, ever-living fuck were you thinking of, Killian?” She walked right up to the bars and grabbed them, her face contorted with anger. “I mean, seriously. Fucking with magic like that can get people killed. What if the spell had gone wrong? Did you even consider Henry in all of this? You could’ve made my son a fucking orphan, you selfish prick.”

He got up and stopped a foot or so beyond her reach. And, right then, she could see it in his face, the instant when he considered lying to her by pretending that he didn’t know what she was talking about. But it passed, and he had the gall to look sheepish instead, like he’d been caught passing notes to a girl in class, rather than casting a black magic spell which had banished the woman he allegedly loved and the woman she actually loved to an alternate reality for a weekend. He looked to David, who appeared in the doorway, and then back to Emma.

“It wasn’t supposed to be like this.” He raised his palms forward in supplication.

“Oh, really? I’m sorry. I don’t have much experience with wish spells, so why don’t you tell me exactly what was it supposed to be like, then?” She wanted to reach through the bars and throttle him.

“You were only supposed to fall in love with me, without her there to ruin everything, like she always does.”

“Oh, well, that’s okay, then. You weren’t trying to kill me, just the mother of my son.”

“I wasn’t trying to hurt anyone, Swan! No-one was meant to be in any danger of any kind.” He leaned in, so close that she could smell the rum on his breath and sense the resentment rolling off him. “I just wanted one weekend, one measly weekend, with her out of the way so that you would finally realise that we belong together.” He jutted his chin towards her. “Do you know how hard it is to feel like that you’re second-best, a consolation prize?”

“Of course I fucking know!” Of all the people in all worlds that he knew, surely he realised that she knew what that felt like more than anyone else? Sent to a different realm as an infant; years in the foster system; abandoned by her first love; baby in jail; replacement baby brother named after the first love who had abandoned her to have a baby in jail: the list went on and on. “You think I don’t feel like that every day of my life?”

“And you don’t think I deserved better than that? Than your pity?”

“It wasn’t pity! I love you. I genuinely do.” And she did. She had. He was her friend, and maybe that was all he should ever have been, but she had given him two years of trying to make it work, which was more than she’d ever given anyone else.

“Perhaps, but she’s the one you’re in love with.”

“Of course she is! But I’ve been in love with her for five fucking years and I’d never done anything about it before!”

Crap. That was not something she’d intended to say out loud with her father in the room. She closed her eyes and rubbed her fingers into her forehead. She looked over her shoulder at David, but he shrugged back at her. Yeah, he knew already.

“You might not see it, but you’ve been leaving me for months now, choosing her over me, running to her whenever things between us were getting too close.” He shook his head. “She always comes first with you, whereas all I had was the constant expectation that you’d leave me for her.”

“I wouldn’t have. If you hadn’t done all this, I wouldn’t have done anything. I made my choice. I chose to be with you.”

“But you wanted to be with her.”

“Maybe at one time. But I had accepted that would never happen, so I moved on. With you.”

“You’re lying to yourself if you think that, lass. You never moved on, and all I ever got from you was the scraps you were willing to throw me. I am your lowest priority, after her then the boy then your parents then your job and anything else you can think of. You’ve never once looked at me the way you look at her. I gave up my life and my ship for you, and you won’t even give up your precious family dinners with her for me. I deserved more than that!”

“What, exactly, do you think you deserved?”

“I deserved your love. I deserved it a lot more than she ever has. All I wanted to do was to make you see that.”

She couldn’t believe that he was being this selfish. Even though Regina had told her that he saw Emma as a prize, she hadn’t really believed it.

“And you thought that making her disappear would somehow make me stop being in love with her and fall in love with you? Do you know how crazy that sounds? Surely you must have realised that, as soon as I knew she was gone, I would have moved heaven and hell to get her back?”

“The spell should have banished your feelings for her.”

“Even if I wasn’t in love with her, I’m the Sheriff. It’s my job to find missing people, no matter what I feel for them.”

“You wouldn’t have even thought about her!” Although he was shouting, he wasn’t angry, Emma knew: he was frustrated. He didn’t think he’d done anything wrong. He was only sorry that his plan hadn’t worked.

“Fuck, you’re stupid. There is no magic in the world strong enough to make me forget her. Even in New York, she was there with me. Even on my best day, I knew that the most important part of me was missing. And that was from a curse cast by an evil old man with powers beyond your imagining, not some stupid little spell that you cast in a mixing bowl in your bedroom.” She needed to calm down before she said or did something unforgivable. She could feel the magic building within her, begging for release. The last thing she wanted to do was unleash it in anger.

“It would have worked well enough. We could have been happy.” And, shit, he really believed that. Everything about him said that he thought she could have been happy without Regina. She had really fucked her own life beyond repair if this was where they were.

“Are you even listening to yourself?”

Her father stepped from the wall and placed a hand on her shoulder, squeezing gently and pulling her away from the bars, nodding towards her hands where small tendrils of white were starting to emanate from her fingers. Fuck. She stumbled to the side and felt David put his arm around her waist to steady her.

“Why don’t you tell me everything?” he said to Hook, moving his hand to the small of Emma’s back, rubbing small circles in a calming motion. “Start with where you got the spell.”

“I’ve had it a long time, one of the many things I’ve collected on my travels. I don’t even remember where I got it from. Some warlock in some tavern somewhere, probably. I traded a lot of my possessions to get my hands on dark magic back in the realms, anything which I thought would get me my revenge on Rumplestiltskin.” Hook walked backwards and dropped back down to the edge of the cot.

“And what does it do?” David said.

“Two things. It grants your heart’s desire, and it temporarily removes the greatest impediment to that desire so that you can achieve it.”

“So, what did you wish for?”

“I told you already. I wished for Emma to fall in love with me without her feelings for Regina in the way.”

She couldn’t stay silent; she just couldn’t. “You can’t just wish for someone to fall in love with you, Killian,” Emma said. “If nothing else, surely Regina’s curse proved that you can’t make a happy ending out of dark magic?”

“All I needed was a few days, a few days for you to stop thinking about her, and really see how much I love you. That love would have been enough, You would have responded to the wish and you would have fallen in love with me, too. The spell intensifies as it burns out, so the longer we were together, the stronger your feelings for me would have grown, and the more you would have needed to be around me. If it had worked correctly, you shouldn’t even have noticed that Regina wasn’t around. You wouldn’t have been able to focus on anything except me and our love for each other. By the time the spell ended, your mind would have adjusted your memories to fit. It would’ve been like we’d always been in love, because you wouldn’t remember anything else. When you saw Regina, you would have felt nothing but friendship, maybe not even that.”

“But it wouldn’t have been real, and you can’t build a life on a fucking lie!” Her body was going rigid again, and she knew the magic was building. This time, David moved to stand between her and Hook, his hand reaching back to find her, and she would have taken it, but she didn’t want to accidentally hurt him with her magic. Instead, she let her forehead rest on her father’s shoulder. She needed to concentrate on the breathing exercises Regina had taught her to control her magic because her emotions were getting out of control. Everything that Hook had just said was pushing her towards a terrible realisation, one which explained why Regina had behaved the way she had in Fake Storybrooke and why, once returned, she didn’t want anything to do with Emma.

“So why do you think it banished the two of them?” David said.

“I don’t know. I thought it meant Regina would have been unable to leave her house or something. I have no idea why it sent them both to another realm.”

“I do,” Emma said. It was one of the few things she’d learned from all those magic books that Regina thought she’d never read. “You can’t separate conjoined magic.”

“What?” Hook said.

“Conjoined magic. Over the years, my magic has become conjoined with Regina’s. It’s probably why she can sense me all the time.”

“She can sense you?” David asked.

“Apparently. Even when you guys were in the Enchanted Forest without me. I can feel her, too, but I thought it was just because I was in love with her.” She closed her eyes and thought about Regina, and felt a pang of deep sadness in her chest. She didn’t know whether it was hers, Regina’s or both of theirs, but she knew that Regina was probably feeling the same thing, too. “When he tried to take her from me, my magic just kinda reached out, I guess.”

Regina had been right. Who they had been that weekend, that wasn’t who they were. They weren’t in love. Well, she was, but Regina wasn’t. Hook had made a wish and magic had transferred it to Emma. Regina had acted like she was in love with her because that was Emma’s truest desire. Regina had said all those things and done all those things because that was what Emma had always wanted from her. It hadn’t been real.

“I think my magic took over the spell, Dad. That world, it responded to my wishes.” She balled her fists and shook her head. “None of it was real,” she said so quietly that only David heard her. “Everything that happened between us was because I wished for it, not because it was what she wanted.”

Suddenly, she had no desire to be there, or to punish anyone. She just felt weary.

What Emma had seen at the mansion that morning hadn’t been signs of Regina’s being in love with her. No, Regina had been upset after speaking to Killian because Emma was her best friend—really her only true friend, certainly the only person who she spent any real time with other than Henry—and withdrawing from her life would have been hard.

“You wanna know the worst thing?” she asked Hook. “You didn’t even have to do any of this. She was willing to stay out of my life so that you and me could have a chance together.”

“What?” That piqued Killian’s interest.

“Your little chat after lunch on Thursday. She told me all about it. And she was going to stay away from me, like you asked.”

“She told me she’d never do that, in this life or any other.”

“She lied. She lashed out because you pushed her and threatened her, but she was going to give you your chance anyway.”

“Why would she? She made it very clear how unworthy of you she thought I was.”

“She wasn’t doing it for you.” She shook her head. “She was doing it for me because she’s a good person who loves me as a friend and she thought it was what I wanted. But now, thanks to your stupid spell, she knows exactly how I feel about her in living fucking colour. And I’ve violated any trust she had in me by having sex with her when she had no choice but to respond. You’ve ruined any relationship I had with her, you’ve killed any chance that I would even want to be in the same room as you ever again, and none of us has anything left. So, you know, great fucking job, Killian. Really well fucking done.” Okay, she needed to get out of there, because she was going to cry, and she wasn’t going to give Hook the satisfaction of seeing that he’d broken her. “Dad, can you take over here? I need to be somewhere else.”

“What do you want me to do with him?” He nodded towards Hook, and tried to take a step towards her, but she backed up. She didn’t want comfort. She just needed to be alone, and she hoped that he would understand that.

“Hold him. Let him go. I don’t really care. Just keep him out of my sight. I don’t think I can bear to even look at him again.” She turned to leave and stopped in the doorway. “I’ll talk to you later, okay? I just, I need a little time.”

“Sure, baby girl. Whatever you want.”

+

She walked for hours, heading out to the woods and back along the beach. She needed to be wherever people weren’t. She needed to be alone to process the fact that she had had sex with someone who had no real choice in the situation, which was sexual assault, no matter how you dressed it up. All she could hope was that Regina would remember that she had stopped—twice, she had stopped twice—to make sure that magic wasn’t the reason for what was happening. It hadn’t even occurred to her that magic would have prevented Regina from telling the truth about that. Regina gave Emma her heart’s desire, probably didn’t know what she was doing or saying as she did so, and therefore was in no state to provide any form of real consent, and, shit, damn, fuck, life was not fair.

The more she thought about it all, the worse she felt, and she cried until there were no tears left in her, and the cold had numbed her to the point where she couldn’t feel anything anymore. Or so she thought until she reached the docks, and there was Regina, waiting for her.

Emma didn’t doubt for a moment that Regina was waiting for her, because it always came down to that: the two of them on that dock, wind whipping at their hair, the brine from the Atlantic Ocean making the air sting against their cheeks, and the weight of expectation hanging between them.

Regina was wrapped up in the black wool pea coat which Emma had helped her pick out the previous winter, and wearing gloves and a scarf that Emma had paid for as Henry’s birthday present to her back in February. And, Jesus, it was physically painful just seeing her, when she was so beautiful and Emma was so in love with her. And it was so much worse now, because Emma would always know what she was missing, in a way she hadn’t before. Emma knew how happy they could have been together, even if it was only a one-sided fantasy of hers.

“Hi.” Regina looked nervously from Emma out to the ocean and back again, her gaze refusing to settle.

“Hi.”

“Your father called me. He told me about Hook and the spell.”

“So, you know everything, then?”

“I know what you think it means.” Regina seemed to be picking her words carefully. “We were worried about you, Emma.”

“Yeah, I just needed to get away for a few hours. Process, you know.” She moved over to the bench—their bench—and sat down. Regina sat next to her, still looking out to sea. Judging from the darkening sky, it had to be early evening. She had somewhat lost track of time during her walk. “Where’s Henry?”

“At home.” Regina folded her hands in her lap and clasped them in a motion which Emma knew she fell back on when she was nervous or tense. Who could blame her? Everything was pretty fucked up.

“Right.” Home. Henry’s home was with Regina. It always had been. Emma wanted her home to be with Regina, too, but that was never going to happen. That would never happen because she was the latest in a long line to take Regina’s choices from her, to bend her to her will.

She breathed in and out because she could still be brave and strong and fearless, even if was just to pretend that she was okay, when she didn’t think she would ever be okay again. But they had been best friends for a long time, and maybe, with a lot of work, they could be friends again. Or civil. Civil would be a start.

“I’m sorry about the spell. I know there’s nothing I can do to make it up to you, but I just—”

“Emma, I didn’t come here to talk about that.”

“What?” She stared at Regina. “You didn’t?”

“No. Well, perhaps. Not exactly. I—” Regina still wouldn’t look back at her, and she was still wringing her hands, biting her lip. “I wanted to tell you a story.”

“A story?”

“More like a fairytale, really.”

“Right. Okay.” She had no idea what was going on, but Regina was next to her, on their bench, and that was more than she’d hoped for over the previous few hours. “A fairytale?”

“I assume you know what that is, given that you’re the child of one.”

“Of course I—” She stopped as she realised that Regina was just teasing her. “Yeah, I know what a fairytale is, although I’m not a huge fan of them.”

“Well, I think you’ll like this one.” Regina leaned forward and sat on her hands, staring out at the ocean. “At least, I hope you will.”

“Okay.”

Regina’s head was down, and her hair was obscuring the side of her face a little, but it was still a beautiful face, and Emma didn’t think she would ever tire of looking at it. She wanted to lean over and tuck the hair behind Regina’s ear, but touching was out of the question for the foreseeable future, she reckoned. So she waited until Regina started to speak and, when she did, even then, Emma held her breath.

“Once upon a time, there was an Evil Queen who ruled over a cursed kingdom in Maine, where nothing ever happened and every day was the same. And the Queen was very unhappy and very, very lonely, so she adopted a beautiful little boy. For a few years, that boy filled her life and her heart with such love and joy that she forgot how unhappy she had been. But it could never last because her love was twisted and unforgiving and possessive, and it made the little boy unhappy—”

“Regina.” God, she hated it when Regina was hard on herself. The other woman gave her a pained look.

“—so he ran away to the kingdom of Boston to find his real mother, a knight in faded red leather. The Knight was bound by destiny to end the Queen’s curse, so the Queen tried to get rid of the Knight, but she found that she had lost her knack for evil schemes. Moreover, she didn’t really want the Knight gone, but she was so scared that the end of the curse would mean that she would lose her little boy, and she didn’t know what else to do. The Queen did a number of unspeakable things, including murder and blackmail and nearly losing her son to a sleeping curse of her own making. But the curse broke anyway, and the Queen was all alone again, and her son still hated her.”

“He never really hated you,” Emma said.

Regina turned her head then, and she was raw and open and real, and her eyes shone with that fondness which Emma had come to think of as hers and hers alone.

“Are you going to interrupt my story the same way I did your apology?”

“Probably.”

“Well, perhaps you could wait to the end and I’ll take questions and comments from the floor.” And she smiled at her. It was soft and it was tentative, but it was a good smile.

“Fine.” She shrugged, and Regina nodded.

“An unspeakable evil took their little boy away, and the Knight and the Queen had to team up to save him, because no-one else could possibly be as strong together as they were. When the three of them were reunited, the Queen swore to herself that she would do whatever it took to make the Knight and their little boy happy for the rest of their lives. But a second curse came, and the Queen knew that she would have to give up that which she loved the most. Even though it felt worse than ripping her own heart out, she sent the Knight and their son off to the kingdom of New York, with only the happiest memories and wishes for a long life together. And the Queen returned with her people to the Enchanted Forest, where she cried every day at the loss of them.” Regina reached up with a gloved hand to wipe away tears from the corner of her eye. “And then a fairy told her that her soulmate, a man known as the Prince of Thieves, was nearby and that he would give her the love she had always craved. So, she tried with him for a short time, but it was a huge mistake, because the Queen knew instantly she could never fall in love with this man because her heart still belonged to her greatest love.”

“Daniel?” Emma tried to smile. It was stupid to feel jealous of a guy who’d been murdered long before she was even born, but she did.

“Oh, my sweet girl, not him—you. Robin could never have replaced you. You’re the one, Emma, you.” Regina lifted her hand to her mouth and pulled off her glove with her teeth before reaching out to cup Emma’s cheek, her thumb moving across her skin. “And this not-interrupting thing really isn’t working out for you, is it?”

“Sorry.” She wasn’t sorry at all. So far, this was turning out to be the best story she’d ever heard.

“No, you’re not.” Regina rolled her eyes, but looked at her with such tenderness and adoration that Emma knew this was what she had been looking for all her life. This woman was everything. “Anyway, the second curse was broken by a third curse, and the Queen was reunited with her Knight and their son, but it was bittersweet, because her Knight had found another. Even though it tore at her soul every day to see them together, the Queen stood aside and let the Knight find her happy ending with a one-handed pirate. It wasn’t what she wanted, but the Queen and the Knight and their boy were a family in their own way, and that was enough. They settled into a haphazard life, interspersed with wicked half-sisters and Snow Queens and curses and all manner of magical mishaps. But the pirate could see what the Knight could not: that the Queen was still in love with her Knight, and still wanted her for herself, even though that was selfish and unfair and everything she had promised not to be anymore.”

Regina’s eyes were glistening with tears, but her hand was still on Emma’s face, and her eyes were still soft. Emma was drowning in those eyes, losing the battle against keeping her own tears inside.

“So the pirate cast a spell, a foolish spell from dark magic which he didn’t understand, and it banished the Queen to another realm. But her Knight, her beautiful, wonderful, idiotic Knight, stepped in to protect the Queen, not even knowing that was what she was doing. The Queen and her Knight were trapped by the spell for three days and three nights. And although she knew it was wrong, the Queen took advantage of the situation by doing what she had wanted for far too long, and took the Knight to her bed, just as surely as she had already taken her to her heart.”

“But the spell—” She was cut off by Regina’s fingers against her lips.

“No spell could make me love you or want you, Emma, because I already did.” Regina was now almost fully turned towards her, smiling through her tears. “I didn’t tell you anything this weekend which wasn’t true last week or last month or last year. And I shouldn’t have let you believe that anything I said or did was because you wished it. That was craven and cowardly of me, and I apologise.”

Emma wiped her own tears away with the back of her hand. “But I transported us back to my house and I undressed you and that was because I wished for it.”

“First, you didn’t wish for anything I wouldn’t have wished for myself,” Regina tucked a strand of hair behind Emma’s ear and then her hand found its place on Emma’s neck, and it was still love and belonging and home, “and, second, you didn’t compel me to do a single thing to which I didn’t fully consent. And, before you say anything else, Killian Jones is hardly a great wielder of magical power. He cast a spell which he picked up in a tavern from a stranger, and it probably wouldn’t even have worked on you the way he intended. You cannot cast silly little spells against magic as strong as ours, Emma, and expect them to work the way they would on peasants.”

“But, I—”

Regina shut her eyes and leaned her forehead against Emma’s. “There is nothing we did together that I haven’t wanted to do for a very long time. My only regret is that I gave into those feelings, because that was unfair to you.”

“Unfair to me?” Emma pulled back, not understanding and needing to see Regina’s face properly for some kind of clue. “How is any of this unfair to me?”

“Because,” Regina paused and removed her hand from Emma’s neck, letting it fall only as far as her lap, so at least there was still contact, “my actions caused you to admit things which you clearly felt uncomfortable admitting and which, barring the events of this weekend, you probably would never have chosen to reveal at all. I know you. I know that, given a choice, you would rather do the right thing than what is right for you, and I had no place in interfering with that. I should have respected the choices you’ve made with your life. I’m the one who knew how much the spell was affecting our emotions and our ability to keep them contained, and I’m the one who pushed you for my own gratification. And that was unfair to you.”

“If you think you’re the only one who got any gratification, then you’re so wrong.”

Regina shook her head. “Not in that sense.” She smiled coyly. “Perhaps in that sense, too. I meant emotional gratification. I may have known how you felt about me, but I shouldn’t have pushed you to admit it just so that I could have the pleasure of hearing it.”

“When? When did you know?”

“Far too late to make any difference. Sometime after the Marian incident. When we were fighting back then, I could see myself in you. You looked at me the way I looked at you before.” Regina waved her free hand in the air.

“Before what?”

“Before I had to let you go. When I thought I could hide my feelings behind anger.”

“You mean after Neverland?” she said, but Regina ducked her head. “Before Neverland?”

“I swallowed a death curse for you. I don’t do that for just anyone. You are, in fact, the first and only.”

“But you did that for Henry.” Emma was stunned. If she was hearing correctly, then Regina had been in love with her for a very long time. How could she not have known? How could they both have been so stupid?

“No, I did that because a world without you in it is unthinkable, just as it was unbearable when I had that whole year without you.”

Emma cleared her throat, because she needed to say the hard stuff if she wanted to be worthy of Regina. But she was scared, and the only thing that ever calmed her when she was scared was Regina, so she reached out and placed her hand over Regina’s where it rested on her thigh, holding her breath to see if it would be pushed away. It wasn’t. Instead, Regina turned their joined hands, her fingertips tracing over the back of Emma’s as it had the other evening before they kissed.

“I only wanted to go back to New York because I’d heard that you’d given your actual heart to Robin, and that just confirmed it to me that there would never be a place for me in your life. And I didn’t think I could stay here and watch you be happy with someone else, someone who wasn’t me.” She couldn’t pretend that, more than two years later, it didn’t still hurt. She was the goddamned Saviour, and the very least she should have been able to do was keep Regina’s heart safe, but she hadn’t even been given the chance.

“Oh, my sweet Emma, you honestly think I would have chosen Robin and fairy dust and soulmates over you if I had known that you felt the same as I did?” Regina’s smile was radiant, even through the haze of Emma’s tears.

“I thought he was your second chance, your fresh start. And I know you believe in all that stuff, so I knew I couldn’t stand in the way of your destiny.”

“And your destiny was to destroy me, but, here I am, very much in one piece. I honestly don’t think destiny stands much of a chance against you, Emma Swan.” She looked at her intently. “I don’t want True Love or soulmates: I want you. I choose you because you are what I want, not because fate tells me so. I choose you because you and Henry are my whole world. I choose you because you are what my heart craves.”

“What was this morning about then?” That was the bit she still didn’t get.

“What I’ve been trying to tell you is that everything’s about choices, Emma. I chose to stand aside for you to be with Hook, and you chose to be with him. That was still the reality we awoke to this morning. Nothing that happened between us changed those facts.”

“But something must have changed, or else you wouldn’t be here.”

“Your father informed me that your heart was broken and that, as he knew I loved you as much as you loved me, it was my responsibility to fix that. He said some other things about foolish pride standing in the way of happiness and the importance of cherishing his daughter, but you know how he babbles on.” She shook her head with feigned annoyance, but Emma was pretty sure she didn’t really mind whatever lecture David had given her.

“My dad, huh?” She was definitely going to ask him about that later.

“He made some good points. It doesn’t happen often.” She tried to sound dismissive, but failed. “And I couldn’t really leave you wandering around with a broken heart and another chip on your shoulder. You are somewhat important to me, after all.” Despite her tone, her face was shining with love, love for her.

“So, do you know how the fairytale ends, then?” she said, biting her lip and hoping that it was the right question.

“I don’t honestly know,” Regina said. “I know the Queen tells her Knight that she wants to be with her, because her real family is the Knight and her son.” She leaned forward again, their foreheads touching, her breath warm against Emma’s cheek. “And she promises that, if given the chance, she will try to make the Knight feel special and loved and wanted, because the Queen is so in love with her that she can’t think of anything else.”

Emma let out a sigh of relief. She raised her hand and brushed her knuckles across Regina’s cheek, marvelling as her face softened and she leaned into the touch.

“But I don’t know what happens after that. How do you think it ends?” Regina asked.

“Maybe it never ends because there’s no such thing as a happy ending. There’s just everything that comes after, and that’s not always going to be good, never mind perfect, especially when we’re involved.” She smiled reassuringly when she saw a glimmer of doubt pass across Regina’s face. “But I think maybe the Knight tells the pirate to sling his hook—”

“You did not just make that joke,” Regina said, but there was a smirk pulling at the corners of her mouth.

“—and she finally gets her shit together, because she’s been ass-over-tit in love with the Queen for so long, but too stupid to do anything about it until it was almost too late. But that’s okay, because the Queen knows she’s an idiot and forgives her, and then the two of them make out like horny teenagers and choose to live messily ever after, struggling through together to make it as happy as possible, and fucking up sometimes, just like normal people.”

“Your language is atrocious, but I think I like that.” Regina’s hands moved from her lap to cradle Emma’s head, fingers burying themselves in her hair. Her face turned serious. “I am sorry that I let you think that any of this was your fault.”

“It’s okay.”

“It’s not. I knew how the spell was affecting us both, and I should have been honest with you. You have this stupid hero complex, and I played into that.”

“Honestly, it’s okay.” Like she cared about any of that when they were this close and things were looking pretty damn good for her.

“And I should have told you how I felt a long time ago.”

“Yeah, you should.” She inched forwards until their mouths were almost touching, her eyes fluttering shut.

Regina fisted Emma’s hair in her hand and jerked her head back. “And you should have done the same.”

Emma wanted to laugh. This contrary, fiery woman was who she’d fallen in love with, and she actually wanted to be with her and maybe if she’d stop talking they could get back to the things they were really good at, like kissing and stuff.

“Yeah, I should.” She nodded. “Okay, no more lies. No more secrets.”

“Some secrets.” Regina’s mouth was so close to hers that it was criminal that they weren’t kissing already.

“Some?”

“Some secrets are good.”

“Like?”

“Like what I have on under these clothes.”

Emma groaned. “That’s not fair.” Now she was imagining all the possible lingerie choices which could be hidden under layers of warmth.

“It’s only not fair, Emma,” Regina’s tongue snaked out and traced over Emma’s bottom lip, and there had to be some sort of law against using the name thing while distracting her like that, “if I have no intention of showing you later.”

And then they were kissing for the first time in far too fucking long, and it was still the most incredible thing ever. It was possession and love and belonging and passion and need. And it seemed to go on for hours, but Emma had felt starved of this, after only a day without it. When Regina eventually pulled back, reluctantly and slowly, Emma kept her eyes closed for the final few moments, imprinting the moment on her brain.

“You’ll definitely show me?”

Regina laughed, a low, slow chuckle, as she extricated herself from Emma’s grasp, standing and holding out her hand to her. “First, we need to have dinner and spend some time with our son, who is at home half-crazed out of his mind with worry for you.”

“Shit, I’m sorry. I never even thought.” Emma took Regina’s hand and let herself be pulled to her feet. And then she grinned all over again, because she was holding hands with Regina Mills and that was something she might get to do a lot in the future.

“Shh.” Regina placed a light kiss on her cheek. “It’s okay. I told him I’d bring his mother home with me, and I will.”

They walked towards Regina’s car in silence, smiling and blushing at each other like highschoolers on their first date. When they reached the Mercedes, Regina walked around to the passenger door and opened it for her. And, damn, that made Emma blush again, because Regina was looking at her like she was every good thing in the world, and Emma had no doubt that she was looking much the same. But something was still tugging at her thoughts and she couldn’t stop herself from voicing it.

“But, you’ll definitely show me, right?”

Regina leaned in until their cheeks were pressed together, her mouth against Emma’s ear. “Not until you strip naked and beg me to fuck you, Saviour.” She stepped back, and she looked haughty and commanding and so fucking hot, because Regina Mills was still Regina Mills, and she could break the likes of Emma Swan with just a word or a glance which would forever make her weak at the knees. And she looked Emma up and down, her gaze possessive and still somehow tender. “Get in the car, Emma.”

She got in the car.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to everyone who’s left a comment or kudos. They are truly appreciated.


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